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The Los Angeles Broad
I visited the new Broad art museum in downtown Los Angeles March 1st with my wife and some LA friends. It contains much of the collection of Eli and Edythe Broad, which is focused on American...
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Automobile as Genre: Robert Bechtle
Robert Bechtle (b. 1932) is a genre painter of the so-called photorealist variety. Come to think of it, almost any photorealist painting is genre because it depicts what a photograph (or combined...
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Joe De Mers: Mainstream 1950s Illustrator
Joe De Mers (1910-1984) was a leading illustrator of fiction in major American magazines -- he signed his last name in two parts, but it is often combined as "DeMers" in many references.I didn't notice...
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Mikhail Nesterov: Remained in Russia and Copied Leo Putz
Mikhail Vasilyevich Nesterov (1862-1942) was a Russian painter in Czarist days with strong religious beliefs who remained after the Revolution. Yet was able to live out his days while not conforming to...
View ArticleDying Magazines and the Fall of Traditional Illustration
Leif Peng had an interesting 26 October 2011 post on his Today's Inspiration blog regarding the decline and death of some general-interest magazines that had supported what I'll call traditional...
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The Slightly Surreal, Illustration-Like Intellectual Art of Mark Tansey
Late February, we visited The Broad, a new museum in downtown Los Angeles (background here). The collection of Eli and Edythe Broad is housed there, a collection focused on postmodern art of the period...
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Carel Willink's Imaginary Realism
Carel Willink (1900-1983) experimented with various Modernist "isms," finally settling into a version of "Magic Realism" that he called "Imaginary Realism." Essentially, everything in his paintings was...
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David Jagger, Skilled Portrait Artist
David Jagger (1891-1958) was very good at depicting people.Although his images were highly realistic, they very seldom crossed the line into hard-edge style. His subjects were often posed in...
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Sprites by Iannelli and (probably) Wright
I seldom post here regarding sculpture. That's because I've never really sculpted, and therefore am reluctant to discuss something I'm not familiar with on a technical basis. But I am willing to...
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My New Book: How Cars Faced the Market
My latest e-book has just been released at Amazon.com. That's the cover above.It deals with automobile grilles and other details of the “face” or front end of a car. Facial appearance has long been an...
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How Much Did Dean Cornwell's Style Change?
Dean Cornwell (1892-1960) was one of the most outstanding American illustrators of his day. I wrote an "Up-Close" post about him here, and here I observed that changing illustration fashions forced him...
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The Strange, Dark World of Zsolt Bodoni
Zsolt Bodoni (1975- ) is a Budapest-based painter who creates dark (usually), vaguely Surrealistic scenes combining nearly realistic drawing with nearly abstract settings. He is basically hinting at...
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More Illustrations and Sketches by Albert Brenet
I wrote about Albert Victor Eugène Brenet (1903-2005) here. He was a popular French illustrator and marine painter for many years (French Wikipedia entry here).He enjoyed going on-site to capture the...
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Earle Bergey: Pinups, Pulps, Paperbacks and More
Earle K. Bergey (1901-1952) earned a good deal of his living painting cover art for "pulp" (printed on really cheap paper) magazines. But there was more to him than that.His Wikipedia entry mentions...
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Edward Arthur Walton, Glasgow Boy
A 19th century school of painting I find interesting is that of the Glasgow Boys (Wikipadia entry here, scroll down for Glasgow Boys material). One of the original Boys was Edward Arthur Walton...
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Adriano Sousa Lopes, Portuguese Semi-Modernist
As best this blog's internal Google search tool can tell, I've never posted about a Portuguese artist. Perhaps that's because there are no famous artists from Portugal. Consider this Wikipedia list --...
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Rudolph Belarski's Pulp Art
Rudolph Belarski (1900-1983) was one of many illustrators whose early career was spent painting covers for the many "pulp" (low-quality paper) magazines that were especially popular during the Great...
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In the Beginning: Frederick Frieseke
Frederick Carl Frieseke (1874–1939) was an American expatriate who spent most of the last 40 years of his life in France. A fairly lengthy Wikipedia biography is here. It mentions that he regarded...
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William Nicholson, Churchill's Art Mentor
A while ago I wrote about Winston Churchill's art. Relatedly, this Telegraph article on Churchill's painting mentions regarding Churchill, that: "First, although he didn’t have any formal training, he...
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Romà Ribera i Cirera: Painting the Fancy Life
Romà Ribera i Cirera (1848-1935) was a Catalonian painter whose genre was high society, though one source stated that he would have preferred to portray poor people. His Catalan Wikipedia entry is...
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