The Art Deco Portrait

Les Arts Decoratifs. Lacquered boxes, silver cocktail shakers, coromandal screens, streamlined furniture and the jewelry! Portraits are far down the list when the subject is Art Deco but they exist. Some, like the Polish-born Tamara de Lempicka (1898-1980) are newly fashionable, some like the Russian Pavel Tchelitchew (1898-1957) are known to devotees, and others, like Pedro Pruna O'cerans (1904- 1977) are hardly remembered at all.
The Rose Chemise (1927) is a daring work, even for de Lempicka, the luscious tones and sleekness of silk and skin need nothing more for a background than the indistinct grey draperies the artist often employed. The subject, though unnamed, shows why the artist, only two years after her first exhibition in Milan, was already the most sought-after portraitist of her generation.

Four years later Tchelitchew, who is remembered as a Surrealist, painted Woman Holding A Fan - and an interesting fan it is, perhaps in tribute the rejuvenated interest in decorative objects in his adopted city of Paris since L'Exposition des Arts Decoratifs, held there in 1925.
Portrait of Madame R. M. by O'cerans replicates a pose often used in French art but, in keeping with the new mood, Madame hardly seems more vulnerable in a reclining position than she would if sweeping into a room. These are new women - and proud of it.

Louis Welden Hawkins: An Englishman In Brittany

You might not think that the son of an English naval officer and an Austrian baroness would be French, but when he turns out to be a painter of the accomplishment of Louis Welden Hawkins (b. Esslingen, 1849 - d. Paris, 1910), the French exercise their expertise at cultural annexation. Intended for a military career, the young Hawkins broke with his family in 1873 and moved to France. After studying at the Academy Julian, he often displayed his work with the Symbolists.

In his later years Hawkins lived in Brittany. Did he feel drawn to a place with ancient connections to his native England? Perhaps. What we see in these paintings is a symbolism tempered to his rural surroundings. In The Orphans (top left) a boy and girl huddle together in a graveyard, regarding what we take to be the grave of a parent. The humble marker seems at one with the muted autumn landscape. When we look up directly, our eye is drawn to a tabby cat perched on the stone wall, back arched, by some unseen provocation.

Just so, in Yellow Umbrella, after our eyes move from the brightness of turning foliage to the figures at the right edge of the picture, then we notice a shadowy form in the water to the left of the trees: a mirage that appears to be a face.

Slightly less enigmatic is The Guarder of the Geese who clasps her hands as if in prayer, or lost in her thoughts as she watches her charges, a source of food or income for her rural family. If we are tempted to regard Le Foyer (at right) as a dour image, it is well to remember that the title translates as 'The Welcome'. Something in the Breton way of life spoke to a taste for ambiguity in Hawkins and, through his paintings, speaks to us.
Images:

1. The Orphans, 1881, Musee D'Orsay, Paris.

2.La Gardeuese D'Oises,, undated, F. Tahan.

3. Ombrelles Jaunes, c. 1900-1909, Musee du Petit Palais, Paris.

4. Le Foyer, 1899, Musee des Beaux-Arts, Nantes.

Maekawa Senpan: An Artist In The Provinces

A year ago (One Hundred Views Of New Tokyo - 15 August 2008) we looked at the prints of Maekawa Senpan as part of an early 20th century group -the Sosaku Hanga movement - that portrayed scenes of modern Japanese life in their work, particularly scenes of fast-growing industrial cities. Sosaku Hanga, or 'creative print', also refers to their new method of working: rather than a collaboration between a sketcher, an engraver, and a printer to achieve perfection, these artists worked alone, adopting the western notion of individual creativity. That idea is an over simplification, of course.

Maekawa Senpan (1889-1960) , a native of Kyoto, moved to Tokyo as an adult, where he worked as a cartoonist and illustrator.
In these prints (from the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts) we see the development of Maekawa's playful sense in his use of color and strong diagonal elements. Even in an early work - Inlet at Hokkaido at right, an otherwise ordinary view holds the eye through the modern clothing the two people are wearing.

Kaurizawa New Road, with its sharp corners, was probably inteende for motorized vehicles.
Although Maekawa often uses the subdued tones familiar from faded older prints, the images always reveal their modernity both through the artist's stylistic gestures and by the demeanor of his huamn subjects. These are individuals we can recognize.


For more about Sosaku Hanga, visit here.

Mademoiselle Mars

Why Ethel Mars (1876-1953) left a successful career as a book illustrator in New York City to move to France, circa 1905, is not entirely clear. But in Paris, she frequented the salon of another recent American arrival, Gertrude Stein and met many of the budding artists whose works Stein and her companion Alice B. Toklas had begun to collect.

Among the artists that Mars met it was the Nabis, Pierre Bonnard and Edouard Vuillard, whose work struck a sympathetic chord, noticeable in the multiple patterns and pronounced verticals that are artfully blended in these intimate scenes.

Known herself as an avant-garde woman in matters of personal style, Mars often dyed her hair purple or orange (redheads being quite the rage in pre-World War I Paris) as the mood struck her. We can intuit her attention to style from the manner she used to compose her portrait-style prints of individuals (the sitting man with the pipe, the redhead in the off-shoulder dress and the woman with the fan).

Eventually, Mars and her companion Maud Hunt Squire moved to Vence, a medieval town in southern France, and Mars turned from print-making to painting. But that is another story.
Image credit:Tres Complementaires: The Art and Lives of Ethel Mars and Maud Hunt Squire by Catherine Ryan, Mary Ryan Gallery: 2000.

"Autocrats"

Between invention and ubiquity, the missing link in the history of the automobile is a group of early hobbyists christened "Autocrats" by the Dutch engineer W. Valdepoort in his book The Selfish Car (1953). Indeed, as early as 1905, an anonymous French caricaturist's depiction of an early traffic jam was titled The Sovereigns (at left).
The early development of the automobile (a French word) was a competition between French and German inventors, followed closely by automobile clubs for the mostly well-to-do who enjoyed a freedom of the road that no contemporary driver stuck in traffic will ever experience. Clubs published guides that recommnded that drivers avoid "autophobic" towns where the locals made known their displeasure with noise, dust, and speeding vehicles.

We get a representative taste of the conflict from a German tourist named Maragete Witte (1905): " a journey through Holland is dangerous since most of the rural populace hates motorists fanatically. We even encountered old men, their faces contorted with anger, who, without any provocation, threw fist-sized stones at us."The arrogance of drivers became a stock subject for early 20th century illustrators, and they did not have to look far for inspiration. Early German traffic laws allowed hit and run drivers to leave the scene of an accident without reporting it to the authorities.
Octave Mirbeau in Sketches of a Journey (1908, translated by D. B. Tubbs) wrote “How frustrating, how thoroughly disheartening it is that these pigheaded, obstructive villagers whose hens, dogs and sometimes children I mow down, fail to appreciate I represent Progress and universal happiness. I intend to bring them these benefits in spite of themselves, even if they don’t live to enjoy them!”

William K. Vanderbilt’s reckless driving inspired the first posted speed limits in the United States. In France, Vanderbilt. had to flee angry mobs after he killed two dogs in Pau and injured a Tuscan child. In 1902, some normally peaceful Swiss beat him and threatened to burn his car, until the police intervened. All this mayhem began when ten year old William K., II, rode a motorized tricycle. In 1904, he sponsored the first road race in America, the Vanderbilt Cup, held on Long Island near his parents' estate and, in 1909, Vanderbilt financed the first road in the country constructed solely for the use of automobiles, the Long Island Motor Parkway.

The first road race in France was the Gordon Bennett Cup, financed by the owner of The New York Herald newspaper, first held in 1900, with a route from Paris to Lyon.
Pictured below is the winner of the 1903 cup, Belgian racing driver Camille Jenatzy (1868-1913), nicknamed the Red Devil for his beard. Jentazy had been the first to break the 100 km speed barrier in his Mercedes. Jenatzy predicted that he would die in a Mercedes, but he could not have guessed the way it would happen. Accidentally shot by a hunting companion, Jenatzy bled to death as he was being taken to a hospital - in his Mercedes.

Images: Musee de la Voiture, Compiegne, France.

Max Bohm And Winslow Homer

These two paintings may well be part of an artistic conversation. It is quite likely that the young American artist Max Bohm saw Winslow Homer's Nuit d'Ete while he was living in Paris. Homer's painting was shown at the Universal Exposition there in 1900 to much acclaim and then purchased by the Luxembourg Museum. By 1890, Homer's style had moved away from straightforward realism; his brushwork pointed toward abstraction and his subjects often hinted at some kind of mysticism. The two women dancing on a moonlit shore hint at the passing of time, just as the waves move, their master the moon will too.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Max Bohm (1868-1923) left home at nineteen to study art at Academie Julian in Paris. Bohm spent most of his adult life in France where he was recognized as an important American painter. In 1895, he settled at Etaples, an art colony on the English Channel in northern France. At home, he remained almost unknown until his return in 1914 at the outbreak of war. Bohm was awarded a gold medal in art at the Panama International Exposition at San Francisco in 1915.

In Bohm's Dance On the Shore, his style is similar to the Impressionists but his aims were with the Symbolists. Acknowledged for the eloquence of his linework, Bohm conjured extraordinary moods from ordinary lives. Caught forever in a vignette of pure joy, the two girls twirling on the beach is his masterpiece. The sunbeams, the clouds in the sky, the littoral shore, all seem to exist at this moment for no other purpose than to frame this moment of exaltation: it is good to be alive.

Images:

Winslow Homer - Nuit d'Ete (Summer Night), 1890, Musee D'Orsay, Paris.
Max Bohm - Dance On the Shore (Joy), 1918, National Arts Club, New York City.

The Gold Cylinder At The Center Of The World

For an early morning, the National Public Radio headline was alarming - The Kilogram Has A Weight-Loss Problem. Somewhere near Paris, locked securely in a vault, the International Prototype Kilogram is shrinking. On this cylinder, about the size of a salt shaker, forged from platinum and iridium in 1889, rests the international system of weights and measures.
(You can read or listen to Geoff Brumfel's story here.)

As I listened, an image came to me; it was Paul Serusier's Cylindre d'Or, painted in 1910. The painting is unusual among the artist's output for being at the same time composed of easily identifiable objects rendered through stains of color and being incomprehensible, without an explanation. What can we see here? It is a moonlit evening, as reflected by glints on water and buildings massed on the shore at right - an ordinary landscape. It is the gold cylinder floating in air that mystifies, that makes the painting memorable.

Paul Serusier (1864-1928) is often described as the first of the Nabis, (Nabi is the Hebrew word for prophet) who studied with Gauguin at Pont-Aven and brought the new synthetism in painting back to Paris. Serusier even inscribed the back of The Talisman, the Aven River at the Bois d'Amour, October 1888 (Musee D'Orsay, Paris) with the legend "painted under the direction of Paul Gauguin." What was intended to be synthesized was visual sensation and outward appearances. Or as Maurice Denis famously put it in 1890, "It is well to remember that a picture before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or some anecdote, is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order."

The Coolest Place In Milan

Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, the mother of all shopping malls, was inaugurated in 1867. Milan, at mid-19th century was the industrial heart of the Italian peninsula and city officials were ambitious to make the world take note of their achievements. To this end, they launched a competition in 1859.

Giuseppe Mengoni (1829-1877), the winning architect, proposed a design that included two covered streets laid out in the shape of a cross, an admixture of technology, architecture and aesthetics that would rival London's Crystal Palace. Naming the arcade for the King of Savoy seemed like a nice touch to the aspiring nationalists, hence the the Savoy coat of arms laid out in mosaic floor tiles and on the walls the symbols of the four major cities: Milan, Florence, Turin, and Rome.

Six years later the first stone was laid and the Galleria was inaugurated two years later. Finishing construction - always the tricky part - took twelve years and ultimately claimed Mengoni's life. He was killed in a fall on 30 December 1877, while inspecting the glass dome.

Even in the age of air conditioning, the Galleria is still the coolest place to be found in the city. Henry James, no admirer of change, enthused about it: "There is no better way of taking in life than walking the streets." And it was here that Catherine Barkley and Frederick Henry whiled away their star-crossed summer in Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929).

Photo credit: Alinari Archive, Florence, Italy.

Delaware Water Gap

In the process of selection , some historical lacunae are harder to understand than others, but a native New Jerseyite could be prejudiced. Why, then, do so many people recognize Saratoga Springs as the great historic vacation spot that it was - and is - yet forget the Delaware Water Gap, once also among the most popular summer destinations in the eastern United States?

Of course, we are speaking here of the well-to-do, as paid vacations were rare in pre-organized labor America. While the working class headed for the Jersey shore for a brief respite from summer's heat, society people and politicians from New York and Philadelphia enjoyed extended stays at resorts like Kittatinny. And so, the custom of sending the wife and children off for the season, to be joined on weekends by the paterfamilias, came to America.

Located in the northwestern corner of New Jersey, where the Garden State abuts Pennsylvania and New York, the Delaware River cuts a notch across a ridge of the Appalachian mountains (predictably, the New Jerseyites gave the ridge a different name than the Pennsylvanians did). The Lenni-Lenapes, who inhabited the region for ten thousand years or so before they had competition in the name game, called it Minisink.

The impact of Willis Carrier's invention of modern air conditioning in the 1920s changed not only our definition of livable places but our summer vacations as well. What stays the same is the beauty of the place, the serenity of Lake Lenape (at right) where Fred and Adele Astaire once canoed. I have a photograph, taken on their honeymoon there, of my mother's parents standing beneath a rhododendron tree - and an engraved announcement they sent to their friends: "Mr. & Mrs. Norman Williams will be at home after..."

You can visit the Dutuot Museum in person or online here.

Images from the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Jean Cocteau: Not Your Average Travel Poster

Penthouse Serenade

"Just picture a penthouse way up in the sky
With hinges on chimneys for stars to go by
A sweet slice of Heaven for just you and I
When we're alone.

From all of society we'll stay aloof
And live in propriety there on the roof.
Two heavenly hermits we will be in truth
When we're alone.

We'll see life's mad pattern
As we view old Manhattan
Then we can thank our lucky stars
That we're living as we are.

In our little penthouse we'll always contrive
To keep love and romance forever alive
In view of the Hudson just over the drive,
When we're alone."
- Val Burton & Will Jason (1931)

By 1931, Americans were officially Depressed, none more so than New Yorkers, whose city, the mecca for aspiring moderns, bore the dubious distinction of being the home of the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929. Nearly half the theaters on Broadway had gone dark and the crash had accelerated a trend, already begun, of the exodus of the movie industry from New York and its environs, to Los Angeles.

In his book Celluloid Skyline (2001), James Sanders argues that absence only heightened the romance of Manhattan for filmmakers and film goers alike. As for 1931, it was the year that Charlie Chaplin's City Lights was released and even the usually optimistic Frank Capra struck an unusually dark note in his comedy Platinum Blonde, whose plot - society dame is wooed and won by brash newspaper reporter - will be familiar to fans of Capra's 1934 classic, It Happened One Night.

The penthouse as the home of glamor and sophistication is better represented by Myrna Loy in the self-explanatory Penthouse (1933). In this pre-Hayes Production Code film Loy's character gets to be the mistress, rather than the wife, and when the man she's with falls asleep on the couch, her character cracks "A few more nights like this and I'll be out of condition." This is the penthouse of dreams we recognize in the song Penthouse Serenade. Berenice Abbott's photograph, romantic though the view is, she titled Penthouse at 56 Seventh Avenue, 14 July 1927.

Helen Hyde: A Student Of Felix Regamey

We followed the Frenchman Felix Regamey to Japan (Felix Regamey Goes To Japan 24 May 2009) and looked at Jingles From Japan, illustrated by the American artist Helen Hyde ( A Little Redhead - 9 February 2009).

Now we bring the two together.
Helen Hyde studied with Felix Regamey in Paris between 1891 and 1894. Regamey, who had spent two years in Japan with his friend the collector Emile Guimet, was also the possessor of a large number of Japanese prints that he showed to his students. Hyde, like her teacher, adopted the pale colors seen in (faded) 18th century Japanese prints.

What distinguishes Hyde's work is her elegant sense of form and the way she structured her images. In The Bamboo Fence (1904) the grid gives form to the outbursts of pattern and decoration in the children's clothes just as, in Hide And Seek (1907), the placement of the wall gives form to the children's' game. For those who might otherwise have difficulty enjoying the charm of Hyde's portrayal of children or be uncomfortable with her interpretations of another culture, her strong compositional achievement moves these images beyond the realm of sentiment.
Images by Helen Hyde (above) are from the Smtihsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.. Images by Felix Regamey (below) are from the collection of the Musee Guimet in Paris

L'Art Nouveau: According To Bing

“L’Art Nouveau, at the time of its creation, did not aspire in any way to the honour of becoming a generic term.”

“It was evident that the future of this new-born movement was in great danger. The only way to save it form total collapse was to endeavor to make it follow a fixed direction, carefully marked out; to keep it within the bounds of sobriety and good sense, avoiding the extravagances of exuberant imaginations and relying for its salvation on these two fundamental rules. Each article to be strictly adapted to its proper purpose; harmonies to be sought for in lines and color.

“There was only one way in which these theories could be put into practice – namely by having the articles made under my personal supervision, and securing the assistance of such artists as seemed best disposed to carry out my ideas. The thousand ill-assorted things I had collected together in a haphazard way gave place, little by little, to articles produced in my own workshops, according to the following program, to the exclusion of all other considerations. Thoroughly impregnate oneself anew with the old French tradition; try to pick up the thread of that tradition, with all its grace, elegance, sound logic and purity, and give it new developments, just as though that thread had not been broken for nearly a century(.)”

“ Is it accurate to say that no definite aim has been generated by L’Art Nouveau, and that its disciples are united by only a negation. ? The truth is this: that no definite style was prescribed, since the work to be done was a work of liberation.”

(Note on the text: L'Art Nouveau by Siegfried Bing, translated by Irene Sargent, appeared in The Craftsman, issue of October , 1903.)

"If, in conclusion, we are called upon to declare the supreme characteristic of the (Tiffany) glasswork, the essential trait that entitles it to be considered as marking an evolution in the art, we would say that it resides in the fact that the means employed for the purpose of ornamentation, even the richest and most complicated, are sought and found in the vitreous substance itself, without the use of either, brush, wheel, or acid."

A native of Hamburg, Germany, Siegfried Bing (1838-1905) began his career in a ceramics factory. After moving to France in 1871, Bing made his first trip to Japan in 1875 and, on his return to Paris, opened the influential Salon de L’Art Nouveau where he sold his collection.
Bing opened his first American showroom in New York City in 1888. While in America, Bing became friends with John La Farge and Louis Comfort Tiffany. Impressed by the workings of the Tiffany Studio and enthusiastic about the potential of the industrial arts, Bing returned to Paris determined to replicate the workshop with French artists, based on Tiffany’s principles. Georges de Feure, Edward Colonna, Eugene Gaillard, and Marcel Bing, his son were among them.
Bing published a periodical Le Japon Artistique from 1888-1891 and a book on American art in 1895. His Pavilion Art Nouveau Bing was a sensation at the Universal Exposition in 1900, held in Paris.

The art works shown here, by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Georges de Feure, and Louis Comfort Tiffany, were commissioned by Siegfried Bing.

Holding Up The World

The striped female figures above were excavated at Mycenae, c. 1400 BCE, a millenium before the Caryatids began holding up the Erechtheion on the Acropolis. (The sketch at right is taken from Louis-Philippe Boitte's 1847 Album: Views of Greece: Athens. Whenever I see a trio of women, I think about who is holding up this world. Ernest Deutsch may have been thinking something similar when he made this poster for the Vienna Tailoring School in 1911.