Buffalo Introduces Pictorialism To the World

Photography has a rich history in upstate New York, anchored by George Eastman House in Rochester and the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo.

Located on Lake Erie where the Erie Canal meets the Great Lakes, Buffalo, New York is considered to be the first mid-western city in the United States.
The Albright Gallery was founded in 1890 and its splendid Greek atheneum was intended to be part of the 1901 International Pan-American Exposition but it wasn't finished until 1905.

The gallery was ready in 1910 to present the first exhibition of an international movement in photography, the International Exposition of Pictorial Photography, organized by Alfred Stieglitz, owner of Gallery 291 in New York City and founder of Camera Work in 1903. A thriving industrial center was eager to become one of the first American cities to possess a major museum. The exhibition put the Albright Gallery in the spotlight.

Among the images hanging on those walls (above) were Edward Steichen's iconic Flatiron, specially reprinted for the occasion.

Two others, whose work Stieglitz had discovered in 1904, were included, but their reputations have faded from view along with Pictoralism, until recently.

Myra Albert Wiggins (1869-1956) had already achieved the first one woman show at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1900. From Oregon, she had studied painting with William Merritt Chase at the Art Students' League in New York.

George H. Seeley (1880-1955) took up photography while studying in Boston. Seeley's most evocative works of his native New England make use of techniques he admired in Japanese prints. This has the effect of making them appear like abstract compositions.

Images:

1. Karl Struss - The Albright Gallery, 1910, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.

2. Edward Steichen - The Flatiron, 1904 repr. 1909, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.
3. Myra Albert Wiggins - The Edge of the Cliff, 1903, Martin-Zambito Fine Arts, Seattle.

4. George H. Seeley - Untitled, 1909, Berkshire Museum, Massachusetts.

4. George H. Seeley - Winter Landscape, 1909, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

Playing With Their Food

Your mother told you not to play with your food. Photographers, like the rest of us, have found the temptation irresistible. and who could blame them when manufacturers invented foods that visually beg to be played with?
Jell-O (1923) by Paul Outerbridge is a busy swirl of tromp l'oeil; it takes a moment for the eye to register what it is looking at. The stripes etched in glass, the moulded gelatin pyramid are a visual pun, a precursor of Photorealism in painting. Janet Fish, perhaps.
The white circles, arranged like some ancient ceremonial menhirs, turn to out be Lifesavers candy. Invented in 1912 by an ingenious American candy maker as a "summer candy" that wouldn't melt as chocolate does, the little preserver-shaped discs have entertained chldren and adults for almost a century. Ruth Bernhard (1905-2006), a German-born photographer, is less well known than Outerbridge. Like so many feamle artists, Bernhard has been hidden in plain sight. She was the photographer who produced the first ever catalog published by the Museum of Modern Art for its exhibition The Art of the Machine in 1934.

A Found Landscape

Back on September 13, 2007, I posted a piece on the emergence of landscape as a subject in Belgian paintigs - Medieval Townscapes. I began a to collect little images that are cropped from religious paintings of the era when I worked at an urban planning agency. Artists in the 14th and 15th centuries began to lavish their skills on background scenes, painting what they knew and leading to anachronisms as seen here, where the Virgin Mary is magically transported to the Low Countries. These vignettes of landscape are charming and instructive when we recognize what they are.

This image is a detail from Raphael's La Belle Jardiniere, from the collection of Louvre in Paris.

Subversive Skaters

In February, 1896 when the International Skating Union held the first figure skating competition in St. Petersburg, Russia, none of the men noticed that they had made no rule excluding women. But a British skater, Madge Syers-Cave, did and when she appeared at the 1902 World Skating Championship, held conveniently in London, she took home the silver medal. Syers-Cave became the first woman to win a gold medal for figure skating at the 1908 Winter Olympics, held at Chamonix, France. At age twenty-seven, she was also the oldest woman, thus far, to win that award, and she also won an award for pairs skating with her husband, Edgar Syers. Madge Syers-Cave died in 1917, only thirty-five, a victim of the influenza pandemic.
Winslow Homer's Skating Scene, printed in the January 25, 1868 edition of Harper's Weekly conveys the sense of sweep and movement of the skaters, along with an ability to capture a moment's motion in the painstaking medium of lithography. Even more painstaking in Homer's case, as he insisted on doing all the detail work himself, rather than leaving it for engravers to flesh out. What is not obvious from this distance, is that these young American girls were engaged in the subversive movement of women in physical activity for pleasure. The boy in Edward Penfield's cover for Harper's (1896) is putting on the woman's skates for her, sparing her from having to lean down in public.

Images:

1. Winslow Homer - Skating Scene, 1868, Art Institute of Chicago.

2. Edward Penfield - Harper's, February 1896, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Winter Trees

This landscape of a tree in winter was made by the Swiss artist Cuno Amiet (1868-1961). Quietly composed, the image, tree, and the viewer join in urging the morning sun to rise.

Watching

These French cats were photographed from the streets of Paris by a Hungarian photographer Gyula Halasz (1899-1984). He adapted the name of his hometown - Brasso - for professional use, becoming famous as Brassai. The man who taught himself to speak French by reading Marcel Proust was an inveterate walker. It was while walking the streets looking for stories that the young journalist began taking pictures. These cats are the watchful eyes of their neighborhoods. feline journalists of a sort. Whether you need to buy groceries or make a telephone call, someone will be watching.

Constant Montald's Whiteworld

"I can change water into wine
solve the riddle for the Sphinx
I like the perfectly primitive
cause they desperately need
my sovereignty over Third World Thebes
I’m a First World Oedipus
and Mother Earth is
down on her knees
Whiteworld. "
- excerpt from Whiteworld by Patricia Barber


It's not so far from the paintings of Constant Montald to the jazz of Patricia Barber as you might think. Barber's Whiteworld, part of her song cycle Mythologies, is a satire on Western colonialism. Montald (1862-1944) was a Belgian artist who used the symbolism of mythology to comment on the politics of his time, Belgian exploitation of the African Congo among them.
Yes, Montald's use of white is a notable feature of his work. As a student, even before he won the Prix de Rome in 1886, Montald studied the varieties of fresco. Delighted by the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the works of Renaissance master Giotto, he brought home an interest in metallic paints, especially gold leaf set off against Mediterranean blue. Even when the artist experimented with a monochrome palette, beginning around 1915, his work remained rooted in the basic white of fresh plaster.
Something else is new in The Ladder and Garden Under Snow. Trees cast no shadows yet daytime scenes are enclosed in nighttime shadows. While Montald was creating these works, he was teaching future Surrealists Rene Magritte and Paul Delvaux at the Royal Academy of Art in Brussels. You can see where things are going here.

Montald had married, in 1892, a textile artist Gabrielle Canivet, and the syvlan scene in shades of brown and mauve is full of what he learned from her.

Montald died on the street, apparently from a stroke, but his death shares the enigmatic, solitary vision that we find in his paintings. The beauty of the Art Nouveau architecture that had recently reshaped Brussels existed irrationally under a palimpsest made by the realities of two world wars, or even everyday life. Montald understood this and he passed his vision to Magritte and Delvaux.

Images:
1. Dancing Nymphs, 1898, Royla museum of Fine Arts, Brussels 2. The Fountain of Inspiration, 1907, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Belgium. 3. Woman With Peacocks, 1909, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels. 4.Tree, undated, Christies, Ltd. 5. The Ladder, Vincent Lecuye Gallery, Brussels. 6. Garden Under Snow, 1916, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels. 7. with Fernande Dubois, a tapestry, untitled, c.1928, Musee Communale, Woluwe Saint-Lambert, Belgium.

The World In Reverse: Maurice Henry

Museums brought out the surrealistic side of Maurice Henry. At the Surrealist Museum, the world is reversed: the people chat from inside their frames as the artworks stroll about. While at the Museum of Nerves, it's the guard who is choleric as the gods and goddesses go on their merry Olympian ways. A kick in the derriere only hurts the kicker. To the poet Jacques Prevert, Henry's work was like a stink bomb thrown at the self-important.

Maurice Henry (1907-1984) formally joined Andre Breton's group, Surrealists in Service to the Revolution, in 1933. His drawings were regularly published in Le Figaro. Henry often employed the double panel in his work, skewering the obtuse smugness of the bourgeoisie in Charity, Equality, Generosity, and more.

Images by Maurice Henry: Pompidou Center, Paris.

A Friend Of Seurat: Albert Dubois-Pillet

Being married to an artist can be a handicap for a female artist when it comes time for posterity to render a verdict. The critics (usually male) like to enforce a 'one per family' rule. Having one for a friend can be hard on an artist's reputation, too. Wich brings us to Albert Dubois-Pillet (1846-1890), a friend of Georges Seurat - the most famous pointillist of all.
Dubois-Pillet was a professional military officer, but being held prisoner by the Germans during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 seems to have provoked his career change to painting.

Dubois-Pillet was one of the founders of Societe des Indépendents in 1884, along with Seurat and Paul Signac, et al. Their motto was "No juries, no awards."

Felix Féneón, a writer who keeps popping up in these columns, wrote in a review of his paintings: “M. Dubois-Pillet presents ten pictures and we know some others. His vision, not very bold, confers on oil a powdery and velvety delicacy, similar to what is achieved with pastels." ( from Modern Art, 1ST May 1887 - translation mine). A fair assessment but, there is a pleasing sense of form in the way the diagonals line up in The Seine at Neuilly.

There aren't many impressive portraits that used the Divisionist techniques but look at this one to see how it is done. The color scheme is carefully chosen; the deep red velvet armchair is mimicked by the wallpaper and by the shadows on the woman's white dress. The warmer undertones in the background are cooled down in the dress. And the woman appears essentially cool. Poised and self-contained, she exudes a cat-like quality in her features and her gaze. The chignon rests on the back of her neck almost like a tail.

Images: 1. Portrait of a Young Young, undated, Museum of Fine Arts, Saint Etienne, France.

2. The Seine at Neuilly, c. 1887, Walter F. Brown Collection, San Antonio, Texas

Indiscretion

This drawing with watercolor was shown at the Salon des Artistes Humoristes in 1911 at Paris. I want to know more about this group! This style will reappear in animated cartoons in the 1920s, especially the naughty versions of Betty Boop. (Seen in the movie Hollywood Blue, for instance.)

How appropriate for Valentine's Day that its creator was a man named Gaston Casenove.

Image: Druet-Vizzavona Foundation, Paris.

"Everything Is Alive, Even If It Does Not Move"

“He who will manage to have us forget color and form at the price of emotion will achieve the highest goal of all.” - Xavier Mellery

For the son of a gardener to win the Prix de Rome for painting, a year in Italy must have been a door opening wide for 25 year-old Xavier Mellery (1845-1921). Mellery had grown up in suburban Brussels near the Parc Royale immortalized by William Degouve de Nuncques in his 1897 pastel, now at the Musee d'Orsay.

Mellery's work, even at its most colorful, comes to us through a scrim. Although undated, his pastel of his childhood home, The Gardener's House, is probably an early effort. By 1882, when Mellery made the affecting portrait of his young daughter, he had mastered the elaboration of detail in this medium. He records a thoughtful moment with spontaneity; he knew her well enough to do so, unlike his countryman Fernand Khnoff, whose portraits of children, carefully considered, unfold like layers of a constructed onion.

Perhaps the visual riches offered by the Doge's Palace and the Ca' Pisani, both in Venice, drew this out of him- the greater sense of depth, the play of patterns. Mellery was awed by his discovery of Renaissance artist Andrea Mantegna, a master of spatial illusion, something that appears often in Mellery's charcoal works.

When I chanced on an early Belgian photograph by Charles d'Hoy (c. 1855), I thought of Mellery. They share a sense of light that seems 'pre-photograhic' in the weight it gives to shadow in shaping images, a sense heightened by 19th century Belgium's rush to industrialization.

“For the mystery and foreboding of the shadows, the meditation turned in upon itself and the silence are the very forms your thought takes on.” - Camille Lemmonier, in a letter to Mellery, dated 1899.
"Everything is alive, even if it does not move," Mellery wrote and that intention draws us to his work. A symbolist but a gentle one, Mellery's portrayals of women are characterized by neither menace nor malice.

(See also a post 26 June 2008 for more of Xavier Mellery)

Images:

1. The Gardener's House, undated, Palace of Fine Arts, Brussels.

2. Portrait of the Artist's Daughter, 1882, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels.

3. Celebration at the Doge's Palace, 1876, Museum of Fine Arts, Ghent.

4. Pisani Palace, undated, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels.

6. The Bedroom, 1888, Royal Museum of Fine Art, Brussels.

7. The Effect of Light, 1890, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels.

8. Beguine Reading by Lamplight, undated, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels.

9. Village Street, undated, Private Collection, via Christies, Ltd.

10. Charles D'Hoy - Doorway of Predikheeven in Ghent, 1855, Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC.

Carrying The Torch

Christian Ludwig Martin's poster announcing the 1919 exhibition of the Vienna Secession plays a variation on the carrying of the Olympic torch. In a nod to historical authenticity, the runner is naked. The 2010 Winter Olympics begin this evening in Vancouver, British Columbia where they're having a heat wave of sorts.

Image: Museum of Applied Cutlure, Vienna, Austria.

Janine Niepce And The Little Skater

Tomorrow will be the 89th anniversary of the birth of Janine Niepce (1921-2007). Descended from the inventor of photography, Nicephore Niepce, Janine grew up in Burgundian wine country. History caught up with her at the Sorbonne, in 1944, where she was studying art and archaeology. It was wartime and Janine Niepce made films for the French Resistance movement to publicize the plight of occupied Paris to the outside world. After war's end, Niepce became one of the outstanding international photo-journalists. She coevred the revoltuionary events of May 1968 dsiguised a a tourist and fought for women's rights beginning in the 1970s. Her son was killed in a mountain-climbing accident in 1980. Niepce became a Knight of the Legion d'Honneurin 1985. From what perch did Niepce capture The Little Skater in 1954? There are no shadows in the picture to give us a clue and the skaters seem unaware of the camera's presence. A resourceful artist has her secrets.

Pink Flamingos

When we last looked at the Jardin des Plantes (January 27, 2010), the Parisian zoo was inundated by the great flood of 1910 and the animals were bemused. Here we see a sunny day, possibly in 1959. A flock of pink flamingos swims serenely along under a cloudless sky, a pink navy in command of all they survey. According to the French Museum of Natural History, the photographer is unknown. Unknown but not unappreciated.

At The Zoo, Again

Last week the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, D. C. said farewell to a panda. Tai Shan (Peaceful Mountain), born here on July 9, 2005, was called home to China to take part in the effort to save his endangered species. There have been many criticism of zoos and their treatment of animals, but the international cooperation to save the Giant Panda is admirable.

On February 3, 2009, I posted a piece about the Dutch artist Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita (1868-1944) who often took his students to sketch at the zoo.
These posters from the Museum of Applied Culture in Vienna invite visitors to the Schonbrunn Zoo. Pink flamingos, peacocks, giraffes, and pandas all live there.

Closer to home, you can visit the animals at the National Zoo online at http://www.nationalzoo.si.edu.

Henri Meunier, Lithgrapher

His father was an etcher and his uncle was the respected sculptor Constantine Meunier, so a career in art was expected and encouraged for the lucky Henri Meunier (1873-1922). His graphic works stand out, even among the talented group of Belgian artists that published in L'Estampe Moderne in the late 1890s, a group that included Henri Privat-Livemont and Gisbert Combaz.
It can be a good thing not to take life too seriously, a truism often overlooked when writing about art. I mean no slight to Henri Meunier when I say that his commercial work is stronger than his fine art, so called. And, on the evidence of these advertising posters, Meunier would have understood the compliment. Advances in lithographic methods made possible a broader array of color effects than earlier masters like the Frenchman Jules Cheret had been able to command.

Now that we take electric lights and automobiles for granted, it requires effort to imagine the time when they were a hard sell. Cars broke down frequently and those who enjoyed a quiet country life, including animals, did not take kindly to having their peace disturbed by fun-seekers. Notice the grinning moon behind that row of poplar trees. Meunier was fortunate in being able to craft images without having to include text in his illustrations. Let's hope the rabbit won that race.

Images by Henri Meunier from the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Elsene, Belgium.

1. The Cyclodrome, 1900.
2. Phares Electric Lights, 1902.
3. The Casino At Blankenberghe, 1896.

Bibi In Black And White

As a companion to yesterday's piece, here are some black and white snapshots of Bibi Lartigue. It's curious that this vivacious woman looks at her least appealing on her wedding day.
Modern and rather impish is how she appears as she sits in the bathroom on her honeymoon in 1920. She was also photographed in the cast iron bathtub.
About 20 months after the wedding, as Bibi carries baby Dani across the lawn at her in-laws' home in Rouzat, her high spirits appear undiminished.

Bibi liked to dance and trained regularly at the gym. The favored leisure pursuits of the day possessed formal elements of style: hunting, horseback riding, ice skating and tennis.
Style, as in the Paul Poiret velvet coat that she wears in this 1922 photo as she stands next to a racing car.

Her gaze is straightforward in this photo from 1930. A mature woman, and mother of two young children, confronts the camera without artifice, her gloved hands casually crossed. It may be that she already foresees a future apart from her husband. In any case, she appears to inhabit her own space. I wonder how she managed.