Alice Neel: An Expressionist Icon for Women

by | Dec 13, 2020 | 131, Uncategorized

Promotional poster for Alice Neel: A Biography. 

Alice Reel’s artistic career and personal life is indeed fascinating. She was born in Merion Township, Pennsylvania on January 28, 1900, the fourth of five children. Her father George Washington Neel, was an accountant and her mother, Alice Concross Hartley was a descendant of politically distinguished ancestors. When Alice was still a toddler the family moved to Colwyn, Pennsylvania, a small town outside Philadelphia in Darby Township where she attended primary school and high school. As part of her high school curriculum Alice took some secretarial courses and after graduating from high school in 1918, she took a secretarial job with the Army to help support her family. She worked there for three years while taking evening classes at the School of Industrial Art in Philadelphia.

After saving some money and with the help of scholarships, she enrolled at the Philadelphia School of Design for Women. She was an exceptional student winning a multiple awards for the work she did. She studied under two well known American artists: Henry Snell, associated with the New Hope, Pennsylvania School of landscape painting, a painter of coastal scenes, and Rae Sloan Bredin, of the Pennsylvania school of impressionists, known for his portrait paintings and summer landscapes with groups of women and children. Alice received extensive art instruction in landscape painting and portraiture from those artists, a training that was to define Neel’s future art career.

1924 was the year that radically changed Nell’s personal life. She attended a summer school program with the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Chester Springs, Chester County, Pennsylvania, and it was there that she met a Cuban wealthy student, Carlos Enriquez. She fell in love with him and they got married soon after in Colwyn in 1925. At the end of the year they moved to Havana, Cuba.

In 1926 Neel had her first solo exhibition in Havana. She also had her first child, Santillana del Mar, who succumbed to diphtheria soon after, while still an infant. Neel’s experience in Havana between 1926 and 1927 forged her ideas about art. The political situation in Cuba under the dictator Gerardo Machado was precarious at best. Although Enriquez’s parents lived in a prosperous suburb of Havana, Carlos and Alice took trips into the city to paint portraits of people from the lower classes. After a while they left Carlos’ parents household and moved to a deprived neighbourhood, La Vibora, where left-wing writers and artists lived. Here Neel had a chance to meet some of those writers like Nicolás Guillén, Marcelo Pogolotti and Alejo Carpentier. She discovered through their writings that art could be used as a political messenger. She became aware of the power of art and literature to affect society in the process of change. She discovered through their books how American foreign policies in Latin America had impacted the lives of people and prompted Neel to share their anti-American sentiments.

Carlos and Alice ended up moving back and forth for a while between Havana and the US but they eventually decided to settle in the US. They moved to Manhattan Upper West Side and they had another child Isabetta. They thought about moving to Paris for a while but that never materialized. However, for some reason, Carlos, unexpectedly, decided to move to Paris and took Isabetta with him and leave her with his family in Europe. Neel had a nervous breakdown and was briefly hospitalized. She went to Europe to find her husband in an attempt to save the marriage. After realizing the relation was over she attempted suicide several times and ended in a psychiatric hospital for treatment. She never saw Carlos again and Isabetta only a few times in her life.

Back in the United States, Neel moved to Greenwich Village. 1931 was an interesting time to live in this part of town. She made efforts to reintegrate into the art world. As a consequence of the Great Depression a lot of intellectuals and writers who lived through it became interested in Marxism and became politically active. It was in this urban setting that Neel started to produce “revolutionary art”, mostly portraits. A departure connected with the turn to Marxism of writers and intellectuals of her acquaintance, and became involved with the Artists’ Union, an organization of radical artists and writers to further cultural opportunities for the American working class In 1935 she became a party member and although she remained committed to Expressionist techniques, she used them in conjunction with a documentary conception of arts function that had a wide acceptance on left circles. She left Greenwich Village for Spanish Harlem in 1938 to get away from the rarified atmosphere of an art colony. She painted the Puerto Rican community, neighbours and people she encountered in the streets. Neel’s primary impulse behind ‘pictures of people’ was to serve as a social and historical record of her times. Her works recall American documentary photographers like Berenice Abbot, Dorothy Lange and Hellen Levitt.

From 1951 to 1955 she was under investigation by the FBI who described her as a “romantic Bohemian type Communist”. Two agents visited Neel’s house in 1955 to interview her. The accepted anecdote is that after the interview, Neel supposedly asked them to sit for a portrait but they declined.

The chosen subjects for her portraits consisted mostly of leading Communist figures like ‘Mother’ Bloor (Ella Reeve), founding member of the Social democracy of America, proletarian writers like Sam Putnam, Joe Gould and Max White and her artistic friends, journalists and poets. For Neel, the Communist activists she painted were heroes.

In the 1960s she moved to the Upper West Side and made efforts to reintegrate again into the art world. From this time are the portraits of artists, curators and gallery owners, among them Frank O’hara, curator at MOMA, Andy Warhol and Robert Smithson, political personalities like Ed Koch, mayor of New York and also political activists and supporters of women’s movement.

She continued to live in New York and thanks to the Works of America Project, she received funding in 1933 through one of the initiatives enacted under President Roosevelt’s New Deal, the Works Progress Administration (WPA). During the Depression Neel became an activist for left-wing political causes and the WPA continued to support her until 1943. Thereafter, she really straggled to make ends meet for the rest of the 1940s. In 1944, she even bought back some of her own paintings that were sold to a Long Island junk dealer. At one point she had to depend on welfare to be able to survive.

In the 1950s and 1960s Neel saw the rise of the Abstract Expressionism in New York (Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline) but she remained wholly committed to representational work. She was interested in real people, not just bohemians and fellow artists. Her portraits of the 1950s capture the characters of her friends and neighbours in New York’s Spanish Harlem with careful expressionistic detail.

To a reporter of Daily Worker – the newspaper published by the American Communist Party, she declared:’ I am against abstract and non-objective art, because such art shows a hatred of human beings …and I am on the side of people there, and they inspire my paintings…’2

She believed that once the subject was at ease in front of the easel he/she would adopt their most characteristic attitudes: ‘…before painting, when I talk to the person, they unconsciously assume their most characteristic pose, which in a way involves all their characters and social standing – what the world has done to them and their retaliation’3. Her sitters in the portraits always appear in the almost neutral space of the studio, with no sign of their status or social selves but their choice of clothes and their physical features. Neel worked with great detail on their faces because in her view the face shows everything: their inheritance, their class and profession, their feelings and their intellect. All that is happening to them in life. What is really impressive about the portraits of people like the labour journalist Art Shield and the Ford union organizer Bill McKie, is that they almost look like homages to van Gogh

She saw her ‘pictures of people’ as opposing the process of dehumanisation and that is how her exhibits of 1950-51 were presented in the Party press. So many of the painting she showed in those years represented the working class of Spanish Harlem, where she lived from 1938 to 1962. Neel’s primary impulse behind those ‘pictures of people’ was to serve as social and historical records of her time. They recall the pictures of the American documentary photographers of the 1930s and 1940s: Berenice Abbott, Dorothea Lange and Helen Levitt.

She developed her own variant of Expressionism with a particular use of colour and lines, in part to present herself in later life as one-of-a-kind Expressionist artist. She achieved a consistent level of professionalism without sacrificing the original qualities of her work when her career took off in the early 1960s. Although Neel saw herself as a realist, she also self consciously saw herself as a modern. In 1977 she declared: ‘I never followed any school and I never imitated any artist’4.

Andy Warhol by Alice Neel (1970)

In 1955 Neel began attending meetings of the Club, an artist discussion group founded by artists who had rejected the traditional art practices. In 1959 Neel acted along a prominent writer of the Beat generation, Allen Ginsberg in ‘Pull my Daisy’, a shot film based on a play by Jack Kerouac. She maintained the friendship through the years.

She remained an artist of the left, like some of the other artists and writers, and her reputation as an artist suffered in part because of her Communist politics. Also that commitment of artists and writers to a ‘humanistic art’ however, put them at odds with their times, their attachment to the human figure made them appear as upholders of traditional artistic skills no longer in vogue and somehow followers of old-fashioned aesthetics. However, after the Cold War thawed sufficiently, and the ‘red scare’ subsided, her merits and the importance of her contributions to a socially concerned art in the US were finally acknowledged.

She has done the work of a whole generation of artists who were afraid for their lives as artists if they were to portrait the conditions of the society they lived in. It is worth noticing that Neel was virtually unknown and had only a few solo shows prior to 1970. In the last two decades of her life however, she had sixty.

In 1981, eighty-five of her works were shown at the Union of Artists of the USSR exhibition hall in Moscow. Interesting enough, an exhibition display partially financed by her.

She was underappreciated for years, but by the end of her life she had gained a bit of fame and public recognition. In 1979 she was given an award by President Jimmy Carter, for outstanding achievement and in 1982 she became the first living American artist to have a major retrospective exhibition in Moscow.

Neel was extremely well read (Auden, Proust, Joyce, Hemingway…). Her breath of intellectual interests, literary, .philosophical and artistic help explain the number of writers, art historians, and critics she befriended and painted throughout her artistic life. Artists Andy Warhol, Duane Hanson, art historian Mayer Schapiro and Linda Nochlin. Composer Virgil Thompson and Nobel Prize laureate Linus Pauling.

Alice Neel passed away on October 13, 1984, her legacy well established and fully acknowledged by both the public and the art world. At the memorial service for Neel, Allen Ginsberg performed the first public reading of his poem ‘White Shroud’ as a tribute to her.

“I have always believed that women should resent and refuse to accept all the gratuitous insults that men impose upon them.” -Alice Neel

Footnotes:

  1. Hemingway, A. (op.cit.) p.248
  2. Hemingway, A. (op. ct.) p.250
  3. Auerbach, F. (op.cit.) p.93
  4. Lewison, J. ‘Beyond the Pale’

Sources:

Adams, Tim, “Meet the neighbours: Alice Neel’s Harlem portraits“, The Observer, April 29, 2017.

Auerbach, Frank “Artist Appreciations”, in Alice Neel: Painted Truths, eds. Jeremy Lewison and Barry Walker. New Haven: Yale University Press 2010, p.93

Bauer, Denise. Alice Neel’s Feminist and Leftist Portraits of Women. Feminist Studies v.28.

Hemingway, Andrew. ‘Artists on the Left’. American Artists and the Communist Movement 1926-1956. New Haven and London: Yale University Press 2002, p.247-52

Lewison, Jeremy. ‘Painting Crisis’, ‘Alice Neel, Painter of Modern Life’, exhibition catalogue, published by Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Yale University Press, 2010 

Lewison, Jeremy. ‘Beyond the Pale’, ‘Alice Neel and her legacy’, Arts & Australia, vol.48 no.3, February 2011

Stamps. Laura. ‘Alice Neel, a Marxist Girl on Capitalism’, Alice Neel, Painter of Modern Life, exhibition catalogue, published by Ateneum Art Gallery, Finnish National Gallery,  Brussels 2017.

Tamar, Garb. “The human race turn to pieces: the Painted portraits of Alice Neel ”, in Alice Neel: Painted Truths, eds. Jeremy Lewison and Barry Walker. New Haven: Yale University Press 2010, p.18

Alice Neel latest solo exhibitions:

2000 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

2004 A Chronicle of New York. Victoria Miro, London.

2005 Alice Neel’s Woman. National Museum of Women’s in the Arts, Washington, DC.

2007 The Cycle of Life. Victoria Miro, London.

2007 Pictures of People. Aurel Scheibler, Berlin.

Documentary: 

2007 Alice Neel: A biography – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZObd29Jv8ks

Latest group exhibitions:

1999 In memory of my Feeling: Frank O’hara and American Art. Los Angeles Museum      of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.

2001 The Human Factor: Figuration in American Artt. Contemporary Art Centre of Virginia, Virginia Beach.

2007 Wack ! Art and the Feminist Revolution. The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Los Angeles.

    

Egon Shiele: Masters Influenced in Oil

by | Dec 13, 2020 | 131, Uncategorized

For this final project I chose to emulate a Expressionist Painting (Figurative).  influenced by Egon Schiele, in particular his masterpiece “Female Lovers”, 1915 also known as “Two Women” for composition, and two others for style and his use of oils. (since “Two Women” was done with Gouache and the assignment requested we use water-based oils as a medium.) the painting was successful in the way that it conveys similar movements and expresses emotions of the figures similarly to Egon, the colours in mine are a bit richer and less muted. 

My inspiration photos for composition and imagery

 

my initial drawing

My Final Painting!

Max Ernst – The Most Magnificently Haunted Brain

by | Nov 30, 2020 | 131

A foreword about the Dada movement in art is a required prerequisite to be able to understand Max Ernst’s development as an artist, his artistic career and his influence on other artists.

What was Dada and what did this art movement want in Cologne in 1919? The idea of bringing together all conceivable materials for artistic ends, and establishing a principle of equality for each kind of material used in the art making, together with a deliberate negation of traditional artistic values set this artistic movement apart from previous art schools.

For these artists in Cologne, the stimulus of Dada offered a highly fruitful set of aesthetic strategies for artistic and social dissent. It is in this milieu that Max Ernst career as an artist developed, mutating from expressionist-inspired woodcuts and drawings into representations of hallucinatory dream states that confused the boundary between conscious and unconscious perception, influenced by the writings of psychologist Sigmund Freud.  

Dada artists are known for their use of readymades – everyday objects that could be bought and presented as art with little manipulation by the artist. The use of the readymade forced questions about artistic creativity and the very definition of art and its purpose in society.

Credit: Yale University Art Gallery Source: https://www.max-ernst.com/

 

Max Ernst was born in Bruhl, a place near Cologne, in Germany. He was raised in a strict Catholic family. Although his father was deaf, Ernst learned so much from him, particularly when it comes to painting. In fact, much of his early years were lived under the inspiration of his father who was also a teacher. In 1914, Ernst attended the University of Bonn where he studied philosophy.

During World War I, Ernst was forced to join the German Army. Ernst emerged deeply traumatized and highly critical of western culture. These charged sentiments directly fed into his vision of the modern world as irrational, an idea that became the basis of his artwork.

During his early years, he became familiar with the works of some of the greatest artists of all time including Claude Monet, Paul Cezanne and Vincent van Gogh. He was also drawn to themes such as fantasy and dream imagery, which were among the common subjects of the works of Giorgio de Chirico

In 1919, Ernst started creating some of his first collages, where he made use of various materials including illustrated catalogs and some manuals that produced a somewhat futuristic image. Between 1919 and 1920, Max Ernst was one of the most enthusiastic leaders of the Dada movement in Cologne. By 1922, Ernst had moved to the French capital, where the surrealists were gathering around Andre Breton and never again worked in his native country. In 1924, in Paris, the artist became one of the founding members of the Surrealist group. Ernst was a pioneer of both movements.

 Soon, Ernst decided to leave France and headed to New York to start a new life after becoming interned as a German national thrice. In New York, he joined Piet Mondrian and Marcel Duchamp, who were his fellow avant-garde artists from Europe. With these two artists, Ernst inspired a number of aspiring and professional American artists during that period.

 

The Gramineous Bicycle Garnished with Bells the Dappled Fire Damps and the Echinoderms Bending the Spine to Look for Caresses
(La Biciclette graminée garnie de grelots les grisous grivelés et les échinodermes courbants l’échine pour quêter des caresses)1921

Furthermore, it was in the United States where he met the gallery owner and socialite named Peggy Guggenheim, who eventually became Ernst’s third wife. It was Guggenheim who paved the way for Ernst to enter the bustling art scene in New York. What captivated American artists about Ernst’s works was his evident rejection of conventional styles and imageries in painting. As young American artists were more interested in fresh and novel approaches to painting, this Ernst’s unique style captured the attention of painters who became exposed to his artworks. In particular, Jackson Pollock was enthralled upon seeing the extraordinary works of Ernst. Hence, the young artist became one of Ernst’s followers, among a few others.

Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning in 1948. Photo by Robert Bruce Inverarity in the Smithsonian Institution collection.

Max Ernst and Guggenheim, Source: https://www.thecollector.com/max-ernst/

Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington. Source: https://travelswithmyart.wordpress.com/2017/12/19/surreal-it-is-surreal-it-aint/

In his later years, he divorced Guggenheim and married Dorothea Tanning, who was a surrealist painter based in Sedona, in Arizona. The couple soon moved to France, in 1953 and settled there. A year after, Ernst receive an award at the Venice Biennale, which was a prestigious awards contest.

Ernst, alongside his wife Tanning, became very active as an artist. . Over the years there have been many artists associated with Surrealism which continues to exert its influence on art to this day. However, those major figures who were responsible for creating the golden age of Surrealism were Max Ernst, Joan Miro, Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte. In 1976, Ernst passed away, yet his legacy lived on as he continued to become a source of inspiration for artists throughout the world.

Max Ernst; The Antipope, 1941-42, ©The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976 Source: https://travelswithmyart.wordpress.com/2017/12/19/surreal-it-is-surreal-it-aint/

Max Ernst; Attirement of the Bride (La Toilette de la mariée), 1940, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, 1976 Source: https://travelswithmyart.wordpress.com/2017/12/19/surreal-it-is-surreal-it-aint/

Sources: 

World War 1 and Dada. Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art. London; Thames & Hudson (1997)

Breton, André. Surrealism and Painting, Icon, 1973

Dawn Ades, with Matthew Gale: “Surrealism”, The Oxford Companion to Western Art. Ed. Hugh Brigstocke. Oxford University Press, 2001.

Leah Dickerman, Dada. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D

IDES -131 06 Oil Portrait

by | Nov 15, 2020 | 131, Uncategorized

The project above was an assigned water based oil portrait. In which I chose a self portrait, primarily because of the vibrant colours. The aim of this project was to match the likeness of the photo, and to demonstate paint techniques, such as rendering the colour, the light, the textures and the flesh tones.  

The Idealistic Storyteller

by | Nov 9, 2020 | 131

The Idealistic Storyteller

John Waterhouse has been called Pre-Raphaelite, but I think calling him a Romantic Classicist is perhaps more accurate. He had the Northerner’s love of legend and mystery, but his Italian birth lent him a warm personality to his renderings of classical myths, with people rendered as if they were superhuman beings. His work was no doubt influenced thematically by Pre-Raphaelites like Millais and Rossetti, among others.

Some of the Pre-Raphaelites, like Burne-Jones, managed to fix the image of pre-Raphaelitism in a mold of its own making – that of the long-haired girl in the long dress. But these girls are anonymous in most of his work and they lack the qualities of real people. Waterhouse’s paintings on the other hand, are sensitive and warm-blooded: they are actually the living models of his studio, with their own youth and their combination of modesty and sexuality imbued with the painter’s creative imagination. His characters reflect the perennial quality of the Greek legends, a strong Southern softness akin to Botticelli’s in which beauty is shared equally by good and evil and the only human differences are those of youth and age. There is no monsters in Waterhouse’s story-telling as in Dürer and even in some of the other Pre-Raphaelites and English Neoclassicists. He brought a refined sense of composition and the instant for the moment in the story at which everything seems to stands still. His art has a timeless quality, to a certain extent in accord with the fashionable taste both in his period and ours

John William was born in Rome and spent weeks of free wanderings and dwelling in Italian cities and country in his early years. He continuously returned during his life to experience anew the atmosphere of his boyhood. His father, William Waterhouse, was a Yorkshireman, an artist who practised with moderate success in prosperous Victorian society.  Young William seemed to inherit his father’s talents. His mother, Isabella Mackenzie, and her younger sister Jane both exhibited portraits at the Royal Academy. At school in Yorkshire, a facility for drawing did not immediately prompt a career as an artist.  It was a working apprenticeship in his father’s studio which eventually led to his entry to the Royal Academy Schools. His initial application to the Royal Academy Schools was rejected – specimens of drawings were to be submitted with the application and his drawing was rejected. He then decided to apply as a sculptor, submitting a model in clay and he was accepted in the Sculpture School in 1870.

It was the influence of a painter, F. R. Pickersgill, a Royal Academy member and his sponsor in the Academy, that was able to return the young Waterhouse to the field of painting.

Early Career

Early exhibition at the Winter Exhibition of the Society of British Artists in 1872 got Waterhouse noticed among the few whose pictures were accepted for their various qualities.

The following  year the SBA’s Summer Exhibition included The Unwelcome Companion: A Street Scene in Cairo (1873). He used his friends and relatives, including his sister Jessie, as models. The Victorian compulsion to tell a story is quite obvious. He was developing the ability to compose a satisfying picture, but he had not yet acquired the combination of an appropriate setting with the pose and gesture of the figure which within a few years was to make him an outstanding illustrator of legends.

Some of these early pictures have no story to tell: they owe their charm to the sensitive painting of the female figure, as in La Fileuse, The spinner (1872) and An Eastern Reminiscence (1874). His paintings, however, continued to appeal by their individual subject matter. His favorite model at this time may well have been his sister. It should be recalled that all this took place while Waterhouse was still a student.

The Dudley Gallery’s Winter Exhibition of 1874 included Waterhouse’s In the Perystile.  It showed the next major influence on him – that of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, who had settled in London with a European reputation. However, Waterhouse consistently painted on a larger scale than Alma-Tadema. His brushwork is bolder, his sunlight casts harsher shadows and his story paintings are more dramatic. Alma-Tadema’s careful research and the rendering of architectural interiors with their figures in classical dress were an inspiration to many students.

Waterhouse’s first Royal Academy exhibit, however, also in 1874 diverged from the classical theme and showed considerable depth of feeling. Sleep and his Half Brother Death relates quite certainly to family tragedy: his mother and his two younger brothers had succumbed to tuberculosis.

Waterhouse’s returned to Italy for periods of travel and study between 1876 and 1883 and produced a number of charming pictures, showing his interest in colour and the play of light. Typical is the picture of Two Little Italian Girls by a Village (1875).  However, his thoughts were ever with the beings of history and mythology rather than with fisher folk and farmers. Examples of pictures of this period are After the Dance and A Sick Child brought into the Temple of Aesculapius (1877) which he exhibited at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1877.

No doubt the inspiration of those works came largely from Alma-Tadema, but the differences not merely in size but in depth of subject are already apparent, and Waterhouse finally decided to leave the train of the famous master at a peak of his own achievement. The 1882 Diogenes (82x53in), precise in its rendering of architecture and the texture of the marble linked to the figures of the girls so unaffectedly posed represent a perfect composition.

It was then that Waterhouse turned in 1883 to the old Empire for his first major exercise in history with The Favourites of the Emperor Honorius (46x79in). The emperor and his pets – the ‘favourites’ – occupy  a space of their own, defined by the darkness of the carpet and his garments, The central figure of the attendant is stiffened in posture, turned away, reduced to the scale of the councillors, who wait tensely, with eyes anxiously fixed on the emperor. The moment of stillness captured on the canvas is a clear mark to Waterhouse’s artistic genius.

Of this period are also: Consulting the Oracle (47x78in), which established Waterhouse as a classical painter, with use of classical, geometrical structures of Greek temples, and St Eulalia (74x46in). The whole force of the picture is centered in the pathetic dignity of the outstretched figure, beautiful in its helplessness and serenity. The potent and effective simplicity, its direct and touching language needs no interpreter.

Later Career

Waterhouse was elected to Associate of the Royal Academy in 1885 and in 1893 he was proposed for full Membership. In 1895 he was elected as full Academician. Waterhouse was now firmly established in the ranks of the Royal Academy and in favour with both critics and public. Hylas and the Nymphs belongs to this period, also Pandora, which appeared in the Academy exhibition of 1896. The following year he showed Mariana in the South at the New Gallery, a haunting picture of Tennyson’s desolate maiden. Waterhouse’s lovely girl conveys all the heartfelt message of the lines: ‘Low on her knees herself she cast’, And on the liquid mirror glow’d/The perfection of her face’.

The Rose Bower, Penelope and the Suitors, The Sorceress and The Danaides are some of the latest Waterhouse’s works.

The patronage of the Henderson family, the financier and his brothers, was perhaps the most important of Waterhouse’s career. Portraits of members of the Henderson family: Lady Violet Henderson, Miss Margaret Henderson and Mrs A. P. Henderson are witness of the genuine friendship of Waterhouse with the Henderson family.

Waterhouse’s paintings have a virtually universal appeal: they are inhabited by beautiful people and recall well-known stories of personal situations. In spite of his Italian birth and sympathies, his paintings are strongly English in spirit. Over and above the question of style, is Waterhouse’s narrative ability. He was in tune with the tales he chose as to extend their literary imagery by his own invention filling the spaces of our imagination in a manner so natural that we feel  it could hardly be otherwise.

Sources

  •  “John William Waterhouse – Style and Technique’.  www.artble.com
  •  www.john-william-waterhouse.com
  • Gunzburg, Darrelyn (2010) ‘John William Waterhouse, Beyond the Modern Pre-Raphaelite’, Art Book 17
  • Trippi, Peter (2002) ‘J.W.Waterhouse’, New York, Phaidom Press
  • Images:  https://www.wikiart.org/en/john-william-waterhouse                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

The Spanish Caravaggio

by | Oct 26, 2020 | 131, Uncategorized

Francisco de Zurbarán (1598-1664) was born in Badajoz, Spain; he apprenticed with Pedro Diaz de Villanueva (1614-16). No paintings of his master have survived making it impossible to appreciate his influence on Zurbarán’s painting techniques and style.

Zurbarán, a contemporary of Diego Velazquez but in contrast with the court painter, Zurbarán remained all his life a provincial painter and par excellence painter of religious life. His clients included Dominicans, Jeronims and Carthusian monks. He had very few royal commissions. His style is defined as a Caravaggesque naturalism and tenebrism (extreme chiaroscuros, great contrast between light and dark).

His artistic career is divided into two different periods: the first period, characterized by tenebrism and an ascetic spiritualism. In the second period, during the middle of the century, delicate and soft forms take prominence, reflection of the Seville School of the period. This phase coincides with a crisis in his painting career with few commissions from his habitual clientele. This crisis also coincides with Esteban Murillo’s successful career as a popular religious painter.

The combination of realism and religious sensibility relates the art of Zurbarán to the practical mysticism of the Jesuits. It was a style that lent itself well to portraiture and still life, but his most characteristic expression is found in his religious subjects. He uses naturalism more convincingly than other exponents for the expression of intense religious devotion. He renders traditional personages: apostles, saints and monks with heads rendered almost as portraits and sculptural modeling, with emphasis on the minute detail of their dress. At the end of his artistic career the figures become more idealized and less solid in form and the expression of religious emotions is a bit tinged with sentimentality. His pictorial art production is popular with monastic orders.

Citations:

Tiziana Frati,- ‘Zurbarán’. Clasicos del Arte, vol.17 , Editorial Noguera, Madrid 1984.

Encycloedia Britannica vol. 23 ‘Zurbarán, Francisco de.

Exposición Zurbarán en el III centenario de su muerte (1964)

Pictures:

https://www.wikiart.org/en/francisco-de-zurbaran/all-works#!#filterName:all-paintings-chronologically,resultType:masonry