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New Suzanne Valadon Biography
There are a few artists whose personal lives are more interesting than their work: Frieda Kahlo immediately comes to mind. Then there are others where paintings and biographies come close to striking a...
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Walter Westley Russell: Portraits with Background Pictures
Sir Walter Westley Russell (1867-1949) is yet another competent English painter I am including on this blog: the supply of same seems inexhaustible.A brief biography is here. Even though Russell is not...
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Art Nouveau Architecture in Ljubjana
Not all of it is good, and just like modernist architecture it would be bad if it were everywhere. That said, I am fond of Art Nouveau. When it's not overdone, it offers interesting decoration that...
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Ugly Paintings: Women by Picasso and de Kooning
Once upon a time -- 150 years ago, perhaps -- the consensus was that paintings should be beautiful. Modernism was a conscious, ideological reaction to and condemnation of traditional art. In other...
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Telling Cruisers and Battleships Apart
Starting when I was a boy and for decades thereafter I had trouble telling American cruisers from battleships. Specifically, cruisers and battleships of the World War 2 era from, say, 1935 to 1950....
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Porter Woodruff, Neglected Vogue Illustrator
Porter Woodruff (1894-1959) was one of five American fashion illustrators Vogue magazine had based in Paris in the early 1920s. He continued illustrating for Vogue through the 1930s, residing in New...
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Some Stations are Terminals
This blog is mostly about painting and illustration. One exception has to do with design, architecture and by extension the urban setting. This post is a bit of a stretch from even those topics, but I...
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Ramon Tusquets in Catalonia and Italy
Ramon Tusquets i Maignon (1837-1904) came from a well-to-do Barcelona family and became a full-time artist once his father died. Some biographical information is here.I will assume that Tusquets never...
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Wassily Kandinsky: Parallel Projects, Ca. 1940
Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a theoretician. Highly educated, around age 30 he was on the verge of becoming a law professor but chucked it and became an artist, an art teacher, and a theoretician...
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Henry Russell Ballinger: Soirées to Seascapes
Henry Russell Ballinger (1892-1993) lived to be 100 years old and was active into his mid-90s. There is little biographical information about him on the Internet. However, this notes that he "studied...
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Edwin Georgi, Famous Illustrator with Minimal Biography
Edwin Georgi (1896-1964) is the subject of a fine new book crammed with his illustrations. I wrote about Georgi's early illustration years here. For more information about the book, you can click...
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Some Unfinished Paintings by Pissarro
Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) had a long, prolific career. His Wikipedia entry is extensive.While I was surfing through collections of his work via the Internet, I came across three unfinished works....
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Analytical Cubism Portraits
Wikipedia has this extensive entry dealing with Cubism. Early on, it states:"Historians have divided the history of Cubism into phases. In one scheme, the first phase of Cubism, known as Analytic...
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Seated Couples by Herbert Morton Stoops
Herbert Morton Stoops (1888-1948) wasn't a noted cover artist for the likes of the Saturday Evening Post or Collier's, but thrived in the next rung or two below. A near-contemporary of Harvey Dunn...
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Picasso's Analytical Cubism: Identify the Subjects
In the second link below it is mentioned that neither Pablo Picasso nor Georges Braque, the inventors of Cubism, wrote a manifesto explaining and justifying what they had done (unlike other modernist...
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Penrhyn Stanlaws: Mega-Cover Girls
Earnest Stanley Adamson, or perhaps Arthur Earnest Penrhyn Stanley Adamson (his name seems to have varied over time) used the name Penrhyn Stanlaws professionally. He was born in Dundee Scotland in...
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N.C. Wyeth Does Modernism, Meets George Washington
It isn't unheard-of for a popular culture figure to disparage the works that brought fame and prosperity and to try doing something supposedly "higher." Examples include portrait artist John Singer...
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Railway Posters by Frank Newbould
Frank Newbould (1887-1951) was an almost exact contemporary of fellow poster artist, the better-known Tom Purvis. Both did a good deal of poster art for British railway companies in the 1930s,...
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Dennis Miller Bunker: Died Far Too Young
The painting above is "Dennis Miller Bunker Painting at Calcot" by John Singer Sargent (1888). Dennis Miller Bunker (1861-1890) lived just 29 years, but showed considerable promise, as Sargent seemed...
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George Wunder's Terry and the Pirates Background Detailing
American newspaper comic strips were greatly reduced in size decades ago and their content was reduced to various kinds of humor. Gone were the plot-continuity strips occupying a half or even a full...
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