Category Archives: Art

Art

Théophile Steinlen’s Le Chat Noir Poster Art (1896)

May 1, 2020 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

Le Chat Noir (you probably don’t need that translating!) was a 19^th century nightclub in the bohemian district of Montmartre in Paris. It opened in 1881 at 84 Boulevard de Rochechouart by the impresario Rodolphe Salis, and closed, after a sixteen year glory period, in 1897, not long after Salis’ death. It is thought to be the first modern cabaret: a nightclub where the patrons sat at tables and drank alcoholic beverages whilst being entertained by a variety show on stage and a master of ceremonies.

Le Chat Noir soon became popular with poets, singers and musicians, since it offered an ideal venue and opportunity to practice their acts in front of fellow performers and guests. Famous men and women of an artistic bent began to patronise the club, including poet Paul Verlaine, can-can dancer Jane Avril, composers Claude Debussy and Erik Satie, artists Paul Signac and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and many others from the movements of symbolism and the avant garde.

The cabaret also published a weekly magazine (also called Le Chat Noir), featuring literary writings, poetry, political satire, and news from the cabaret and the local art scene. The iconic poster art, which most people will recognise (and a few may even have it in magnet form on their fridge) was by Swiss Art Nouveau artist and printmaker, Théophile Steinlen.

Steinlen was in his early twenties and still developing his skills as a painter when he was encouraged by fellow Swiss artist François Bocion to move to the artistic community of Montmartre. Once there, Steinlen was introduced to the crowd at Le Chat Noir, which led to commissions to do poster art for them and other commercial enterprises. Here’s a selection of his poster art, starting with the famous La Tournée du Chat Noir (produced for when Salis took his cabaret show on tour). All Steinlen’s posters have an enduring appeal, and I’d bet that all of them are familiar to you.

Art

Sir Henry Raeburn’s The Skating Minister (1790)

February 21, 2020 davewheeler2@hotmail.com 2 Comments

Several times, in a former job role, I had occasion to travel by train to Edinburgh’s Waverley Station and from thence to our site in Livingston, where I would do my thing, stay overnight, and make the return journey home the next day. Although usually the booked train tickets allowed little room for extracurricular activities, there was one occasion on which I managed to engineer a couple of spare hours to visit Edinburgh’s National Gallery. It’s a five-minute walk from Waverley Station, past the Walter Scott monument and along Princes Street Gardens, and it is well worth the effort.

One of the more unusual of its collection is Henry Raeburn’s The Skating Minister. Painted around 1790, it depicts the Reverend Robert Walker, minister at Edinburgh’s Canongate Kirk, skating on Duddingston Loch. It was practically unknown until 1949 (when it was acquired), but has since become something of an icon of Scottish culture, painted as it was during the Scottish Enlightenment. It is today rare for Duddingston Loch to be sufficiently frozen for skating, but in the Little Ice Age that encompassed the 18th century, the loch was the favourite meeting place of the Edinburgh Skating Club, of whom Robert Walker was a prominent member.

Sir Henry Raeburn was Edinburgh’s own, too. Born in Stockbridge, a former village now part of Edinburgh, he was responsible for some thousand portraits of Scotland’s great and good. He was disinclined to leave his native land and, as a result, his renown in Scotland is not matched in England where the names of Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough dominate the portraiture of the period. But in the Scottish National Gallery, he is far from forgotten, and his Skating Minister will remain a firm favourite there for years to come.

Art

Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes (1620)

January 10, 2020 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

The first member of the artistic Gentileschi family that I became aware of was the Italian Baroque artist, Orazio Gentileschi, whose Rest on the Flight to Egypt I came across a few years back in Vienna’s magnificent Kunsthistorisches Museum. However, as acclaimed as Orazio was, it is his daughter, Artemisia, whose name has come down to us today bearing the most critical acclaim, and not just because she is championed as a woman who thrived in a man’s world, but also because she was literally a brilliant and accomplished world-class artist.

Artemisia flourished in the first half of the 17th century, working in her father’s workshop in Rome but also later working in Florence, Venice, Naples and even in London where both she and her father had a spell working as court painters for Charles I not long before the outbreak of the English Civil War. She specialized in painting naturalistic pictures of strong and suffering women from myth, allegory, and the Bible — Susanna and the Elders, Judith Slaying Holofernes, Delilah, Salome, Bathsheba, Lucretia, Cleopatra, Jael, Mary Magdalene…

Her works are convincing depictions of the female figure, anywhere between nude and fully clothed, and she clearly had a wonderful talent for handling colour and building depth. Her Judith Slaying Holofernes, painted between 1614 and 1620, is a dramatic piece of art theatre. It depicts the scene of Judith beheading Holofernes, an episode taken from the apocryphal Book of Judith in the Old Testament, in which the Assyrian general Holofernes is assassinated by the Israelite heroine Judith. The painting shows the moment when Judith, helped by her maidservant, beheads the general after he has fallen asleep drunk. Artemisia was just seventeen when she painted this, so precocious was her talent.

That she was a woman painting in the seventeenth century is worthy of note, of course (how much more art would exist today had talented female artists, the ones that were less connected or gutsy than Artemisia, been allowed to express themselves?). But purely on her work alone she was one of the most progressive and expressive painters of her generation, and that was a generation that was already rich in artists inspired and flourishing in the footsteps of Caravaggio. As it happens, she is due to be commemorated this spring in a retrospective exhibition at London’s National Gallery. I’ll be there, hopefully!

Art

Gustave Caillebotte’s The Floor Scrapers (1875)

November 15, 2019 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

Many leading artists in mid-19th century France liked to test their artistic skills by depicting farm workers and peasants at toil in the countryside – Courbet’s The Stone Breakers (1850) and Millet’s The Gleaners (1857), for example.

As the century wore on, some artists began to explore the concept of men and women at work in urban settings – Manet’s The Road-Menders in the Rue de Berne (1878) springs to mind, as does Women Ironing (1884) by Degas. Of this genre, a personal favourite of mine comes from Gustave Caillebotte and is called The Floor Scrapers (Les Raboteurs de Parquet).

It depicts three topless men working on hands and knees, scraping away at a parquet floor in a Parisian apartment (thought to be Caillebotte’s own studio). The composition is documentary-style, focusing on the actions and techniques of the floor-scrapers. Daylight enters the room from a window on the far wall and glosses the smooth floorboards with a white sheen. There are several floor-scraping tools as well as an opened bottle of (presumably cheap) wine. The diagonal alignment of the floorboards is offset by the rectangular panels on the far wall and by the curlicue motif of the iron grill on the window and the wood shavings that litter the floor. It is a masterpiece of realist painting.

His piece was perfectly in keeping with academic traditions, in terms of its perspective and the modelling and positioning of the nude torsos of the workers. However, despite this, the painting was rejected at the 1875 Salon because of its ‘vulgar’ realism. There’s no accounting for taste. So Caillebotte threw his lot in with the Impressionists and exhibited it at the Impressionist Exhibition of 1876.

These days, The Floor Scrapers is held in the Musée d’Orsay, although when I visited, a few years ago, I was disappointed to find it was not on display – you can’t win ‘em all (and I’ll just have to visit again when next in Paris)!

Art

Katsushika Hokusai’s Ejiri In Suruga Province (c.1830)

October 18, 2019 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

The Edo period in Japan was a 250 year period of stability, lasting between 1603 and 1868, when the country was under the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate. It was a rich time for the development of Japanese culture and saw the development of Japanese cultural themes recognisable today like kabuki theatre, Geisha girls, sumo wrestling and ukiyo‑e woodblock print art.

Ukiyo‑e translates as “pictures of the floating world” and referred to the hedonistic lifestyle prevalent in the pleasure districts of Edo (modern-day Tokyo). Thus, we see a variety of erotic themes in this art, but also plenty of landscapes, flora and fauna, and scenes from history and folk tales. A famous proponent of ukiyo‑e was Katsushika Hokusai (1760–1849), best known for his woodblock print series Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji which includes the internationally iconic print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa.

Hokusai created the Thirty-Six Views both as a response to a domestic travel boom and as part of a personal obsession with Mount Fuji. The series depicts Mount Fuji from different locations and in various seasons and weather conditions. It was this series, and specifically The Great Wave print, that secured Hokusai’s fame both in Japan and overseas. They are wonderfully simple yet evocative pieces.

The series was produced from around 1830 to 1832, when Hokusai was in his seventies and at the height of his career. As well as The Great Wave, you may also recognise Rainstorm Beneath the Summit and Fine Wind, Clear Morning. My personal favourite, however, is Ejiri in Suruga Province: a sudden gust of wind takes some travellers by surprise, blowing away the hat of a man who tries in vain to catch it. Bits of paper whirl away from a woman’s backpack and scatter into the air. The woman’s wind-tossed cloth covers her face, and the tall tree in the foreground loses its leaves. Other travellers face the wind, crouching low to avoid it and clinging to their hats. Fuji, meanwhile, stands white and unshaken, affected neither by the wind nor the human drama.

Art

Cyril Power’s The Tube Train (1934)

September 20, 2019 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

In 2013 the London Underground celebrated its sesquicentennial, and to mark that milestone, the London Transport Museum launched “Poster Art 150”, a selection of the best posters from 150 years of London Underground marketing, everything from this from 1905…

…to this from 1998…

One of the many artists and designers who contributed to the London Underground’s campaigns happened to be one of the pioneers and leading exponents of the linocut in England: one Cyril Power.

In 1925, along with fellow artists Sybil Andrews, Iain McNab and Claude Flight, Power had co-founded the Grosvenor School of Modern Art in Warwick Square, London. He became the principal lecturer and Sybil Andrews became school secretary. Power taught aesthetics in architecture; McNab taught woodcut, and Claude Flight ran classes in linocutting, the printmaking technique that is a variant of woodcut in which a sheet of linoleum is used for the relief surface. Soon, the school achieved a name for itself and it began to attract students from as far afield as Australia and New Zealand.

Cyril Power and Sybil Andrews themselves attended Flight’s classes and became adept linocut artists. They began co-authoring prints together, and mounted a series of exhibitions which attracted considerable interest. In 1930, they established a studio in Hammersmith close to the River Thames, a location which inspired many prints by both artists, such as The Eight by Cyril Power and Bringing in the Boat by Sybil Andrews (both in the gallery below). Then, beginning in 1932, the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (as the London Underground was then) commissioned a series of posters, including Power’s Tube Station (1932) and The Tube Train (1934).

Power’s linocuts explored the speed, movement, and flow of modern urban London, and you can clearly discern the movement and energy in his prints. It’s no surprise that one of his favourite subjects was the London Underground, a symbol of the modern industrial age. Let’s look at Power’s vibrant Tube linocuts and a selection of other linocuts by both him and Sybil Andrews.

The Tube Train (1934)

More Cyril Power Linocuts…

…and a selection of Sybil Andrews linocuts…

Art

Otto Dix’s Metropolis Tryptych (1928)

September 6, 2019 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

The period, in Germany, between the end of World War I in 1918 and Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 is a fascinating one: there was a rapid emergence of innovation in the arts and sciences, embodied in the term “Weimar culture” (after the Weimar Republic, which was the unofficial designation for the German state at that time).

Luminaries in the sciences during the period included Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg and Max Born; Walter Gropius was busy inventing modern architecture and design with the Bauhaus movement; Ludwig Prandtl was pioneering aeronautical engineering. In the arts, German Expressionism was reaching its peak: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis expressed the public’s fascination with futurism and technology; concert halls were beginning to hear the atonal, modern experimental music of Kurt Weill and Arnold Schoenberg, whilst Bertolt Brecht was shaking up the theatre.

However, 1920s Berlin also had a dark underbelly and a reputation for decadence. There was a significant rise in prostitution, drug use, and crime. The cabaret scene, as documented by Britain’s Christopher Isherwood in his novel Goodbye to Berlin (which was eventually adapted into the musical movie, Cabaret), was emblematic of Berlin’s decadence. Many of the painters, sculptors, composers, architects, playwrights, and filmmakers associated with the time would be the same ones whose art would later be denounced as “degenerate art” (Entartete Kunst) by Adolf Hitler.

A new cultural movement started around this time, however – named New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit). Its members turned away from the romantic ideals of German Expressionism and adopted instead an unsentimental perspective on the harsh realities of German society. A leading member of this movement was Otto Dix, and it is his paintings – satirical and at times savage — that I’m showcasing here. He wished to portray the decay of the post-war life; thus, frequent themes include the prostitutes and downtrodden of Berlin, their defects exaggerated to the point of caricature. He also painted many of the prominent characters from his milieu, in a style influenced by the dadaism and cubism art movements.

Here is a small selection of his art from the Weimar years, beginning with his 1928 tryptych, Metropolis (Großstadt), which incorporated crippled war veterans, prostitutes, musicians, dancers, and night club revellers into its three-panel indictment of contemporary Berlin life. Incidentally, when the Nazis came to power, Dix had to promise to paint only inoffensive landscapes: that must have been excruciating for him!

Art

Tipu’s Tiger (c. 1790)

August 26, 2019 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

Between 1767 and 1799 there was a series of wars fought between the British East India Company and the Kingdom of Mysore, all part of the ongoing struggle of the British to consolidate dominion in the Indian subcontinent and lay the ground for what would become the British Empire. The Fourth, and last, Anglo-Mysore War culminated in 1799 with the decisive defeat and death of Tipu Sultan, the ruler of the Mysoreans, at the siege of his capital, Seringapatam.

During the subsequent plunder of Tipu’s palace, East India Company troops came across an unusual and intriguing mechanical toy in a room given over to musical instruments. It was a carved and painted wooden tiger savaging a near life-size European man. Concealed inside the tiger’s body, behind a hinged flap, was an organ which could be operated by the turning of a handle next to it. This simultaneously made the man’s arm lift up and down and produced noises intended to imitate his dying moans and the growls of the tiger. A piece more emblematic of the Sultan’s antipathy towards the British would be hard to find!

The Governors of the East India Company sent the interesting object back to London, where, after a few years in storage, it was displayed in the reading-room of the East India Company Museum and Library at East India House in Leadenhall Street. It proved to be a very popular exhibit and the public could not only view Tipu’s Tiger, but crank its handle and operate its machinery at will. This they did on a regular basis, apparently, to the deep annoyance of students trying to study there. No surprise then, that at some point the handle disappeared, and the periodical The Athenaeum reported that:

“Luckily, a kind fate has deprived him of his handle… and we do sincerely hope he will remain so, to be seen and admired but to be heard no more”

In 1880, the Victoria and Albert Museum acquired the piece, and it remains there to this day (the handle has of course been replaced, though not for the public to crank). Tipu was big into his tigers: he had jewelled, golden tiger heads as finials on his throne, tiger stripes stamped onto his coinage, and tigers incorporated into the Mysorean swords, guns, and mortars. However, this wonderfully painted piece is certainly the most unusual! Do call into the V&A if you get the opportunity.

Art

Giovanni Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons (1761)

June 21, 2019 davewheeler2@hotmail.com 1 Comment

Venice had been one of the great trading powers of medieval and Renaissance Europe, but by the 18th-century its political dominion was waning. Although past its heyday, the republic still possessed great appeal to the emerging tourist market; it was a preeminent destination for the thousands of prominent young adult males embarking on the “Grand Tour”. Capitalising on the tourists’ desire to secure a memento, there developed the genre of view painting, spawning a plethora of paintings of the Rialto Bridge, the Grand Canal and St Mark’s Square, by the likes of Canaletto, Bellotto, and the Guardi brothers.

As well as real city views, the artists sometimes liked to let their fancy fly and paint imaginary views (capricci) that placed buildings, archaeological ruins and other architectural elements together in fictional and often fantastical combinations. The name of one such artist, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, is not particularly well-known these days but nonetheless left to history a series of etchings whose influence is felt to this day: the so-called Imaginary Prisons (Le Carceri).

These prisons of Piranesi’s imagination were dark, labyrinthine depictions of a nightmare world. Ever since they were published — the first edition in the late 1740s, the second, even darker one in 1761 — Piranesi’s images have inspired designers, writers and architects alike. We can see elements of them in Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and in Michael Radford’s adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. The etchings foreshadow M C Escher’s playful explorations of perspective, and we can even see their influence in the moving staircases at Hogwarts.

Piranesi’s prison interiors have no outer walls; each vista is cut off only by the frame of the image itself. The spaces are large and continuous: they may not even be interiors; this may be a city that has grown into a world, where interior and exterior are no longer definable. We see strange devices suggestive of torture: wheels with spikes, pulleys, baskets big enough to contain a person. You don’t quite know how they work, or what the thinking could be behind them. Prisoners undergo mysterious torments, chained to posts, whilst high above them spectators gather on a vertiginous walkway. It is impossible to tell at times who is a prisoner, who a guard, who a visitor, and in the end you suspect that everyone in this place is a prisoner.

Some of Piranesi’s Imaginary Prisons:

…and some examples of their influence in modern culture:

Art

Mary Cassatt’s Young Mother Sewing (1900)

June 7, 2019 davewheeler2@hotmail.com Leave a comment

When we think of the Impressionists, we tend to think about Monet, Renoir, Degas, Cézanne…and quite rightly, because they were titans of their art. However, less well-known to us (always the way, unfortunately, eh ladies?) were “les trois grandes dames” of Impressionism, namely Marie Bracquemond, Berthe Morisot and the subject of today’s blog, Mary Cassatt. These women more than held their own amongst their male counterparts; all three produced wonderful art and exhibited successfully at the Paris Salons.

Mary Cassatt was a young American artist who arrived in Paris in 1866, having quit the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts back home, due to the lack of inspiration and patronising attitude of the male students and teachers there. Although we associate the birth of feminism with the early 1900s, the first wave of feminism began as early as the 1840s, and some doors were opened to women, particularly in cosmopolitan Paris, to which Mary was drawn.

Not all doors were opened, however: women still couldn’t study art at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts so Cassatt signed up for private study with Jean-Léon Gérôme, (the Orientalist I wrote about back in March) and she became an advocate for women’s equality all her life. She became a friend and collaborator of Edgar Degas, too. They had studios a five-minute stroll apart, and Degas would regularly look in at Mary’s studio, offering advice and helping find models.

Cassatt’s art centred on the lives of women, and in particular she painted many works depicting the intimate bond between mother and child. It is that aspect I am showcasing here, with a gallery of pieces featuring some often touching depictions of mother and child, beginning with Young Mother Sewing, painted in 1900 and purchased a year later by influential art collector and feminist Louisine Havemeyer, who fittingly used it to raise money for the women’s suffrage cause.