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People at the New York World's Fair: June 1965
It's August and vast swathes of Art Contrarian readership are probably off on holiday. So I think I'll indulge myself in this post ...The world's fair held in New York City in 1964 and 1965 attracted...
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Władysław Czachórski's Elegant Subjects
Władysław Czachórski (1850-1911), also known as Ladislaus von Czachórski in Germany, was born in the part of Poland controlled by Russia. In German, his name is pronounced Wuadisuaf Tschachurski, for...
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Architecture and Design at the 1964 New York World's Fair
World's fairs are usually showcases for architects and designers to strut their stuff. By the 1920s the stuff they wanted to show off was either the latest in modern (or Moderne) thinking or perhaps...
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Anna Zinkeisen, Doris' Sister
Anna Katrina Zinkeisen (1901-1976) wasn't quite as glamorous as her older sister Doris (who I wrote about here), but she seems to have been the better artist.Anna's Wikipedia entry is here, and a link...
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Henryk Siemiradzki, Painter of Large Works
Henryk Hektor Siemiradzki (1843-1902) was Polish, but his family was prominent in Imperial Russia, his father being an army general. As this biography mentions, he first trained in physics and...
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Nikolaos Gyzis, a Greek in Munich
Since emerging from Ottoman rule ca. 1832, Greece has remained economically peripheral to Europe. Which is probably why Greece-born Nikolaos Gyzis (1842-1901) studied art in Munich, returned home, and...
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Bill Cumming, Last of the Northwest School
William Lee "Bill" Cumming (1917-2010) was not one of the "mystic" school of Pacific Northwest painting. The best-known of that crew were Mark Tobey, Morris Graves and Guy Anderson. As a young man in...
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Harry Willson Watrous, Who Profiled Women
Harry Willson Watrous (1857-1940) was president of the National Academy of Design, 1933-34, but there is not much information about him on the Internet. One might consult this Dutch Wikipedia entry, or...
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Gaston La Touche's La Belle Époque
Gaston La Touche (1854-1913) did not receive expert art training, but his ability and the influence of Impressionist painters and other sources led him to a successful career as a painter and...
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Eric Fischl and Photoshop
Eric Fischl (1948 - ) is for me an important post-modernist artist because he broke from abstraction and moved to realist paintings of people in psychologically ambiguous situations. Plus, his work was...
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Brynolf Wennerberg and His Smiling Women
Gunnar Brynolf Wennerberg (1866-1950) was born in Sweden, but made a successful career elsewhere, mostly in Germany. His Wikipedia entries are only in Swedish and German as of the time this post was...
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Up Close: Alfred Maurer at the Huntington
Alfred Henry Maurer (1868-1932) began as a representational painter influenced by James McNeill Whistler and then switched to various schools of modernism before committing suicide.I wrote about Maurer...
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George Lepape, Golden Age Fashion Illustrator
Once upon a time, fashion illustration -- be it hand-drawn or photography -- was elegant. Quite unlike the ugly photos of strange looking models that populate both advertising and editorial content in...
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Some André Derain Landscapes
André Derain (1880-1954) is probably best known for joining with Henri Matisse in creating Fauvism in the early years of the 20th century. But that was as far as he got along the modernist path --...
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Leslie Thrasher: Not Quite a Rockwell
A while ago I posted about Liberty magazine, a second-tier American general-interest magazine published 1924-1950, mentioning that "Liberty's cover artists, while entirely competent, were seldom in the...
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Some New York Skyscrapers
Here is Yr. Faithful Blogger on New York City's East 56th Street in early September.I spent around ten years within striking distance of New York, but have hardly visited the place since the late...
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Up Close: Some Sargent Brushwork
John Singer Sargent's reputation continues to rise.For example, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art now has a room with several fine examples of his portraiture, as the above photo I took in...
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Gerald Murphy's Precision Modernism
Gerald Clery Murphy (1888-1964) went to Yale and was a member of some of the best clubs -- DKE ("Deke") and Scull and Bones. His father owned New York's posh Mark Cross store, and Murphy himself later...
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Some Stubby Postwar New York "Skyscrapers"
When Wall Street crashed in October 1929 marking the start of the Great Depression, a large amount of office space in New York City was either under construction or in such advanced a planning stage...
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Terence Cuneo Sampler
Terence Cuneo (1907-1996) was a prominent British illustrator who specialized in mechanical objects, yet was quite capable of depicting people -- something some tech artists have trouble with. On the...
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