Millard Sheets: General-Purpose Artist

Millard Sheets (1907-1989), was a Californian involved in a variety of art-related activities ranging from watercolor and oil painting to mosaic design, architecture, and art school administration. This diversity of pursuits (perhaps along with the fact that he wasn't totally in the modernist/abstraction tank) might have diluted his image to the point where he isn't well known today.

Since I don't want this post to be too lengthy, I suggest that readers interested in details regarding Sheets' life and career link to here and here for plenty of information. His son maintains this site, the page I linked to containing examples of works that are confirmed as not being Sheets' paintings and others of dubious provenance.

Below are examples of what Sheets did.

Gallery

Angel's Flight - 1931
This early painting is perhaps his best-known. It deals with what might be the station platform for a funicular that transported people to the now vanished Bunker Hill neighborhood in downtown Los Angeles.

Tenement Flats - c.1934
This also looks like the old Bunker Hill area.

California - 1935

Padua Olive Hills Drive - 1940

World of Life - mural, Hesburgh Library, University of Notre Dame - 1964
Details regarding this project can be found here.

Home Savings Bank building - Sunset & Vine, Hollywood - 1968
Sheets was not a licensed architect. But his Millard Sheets Designs Company did have architects working under his direction. Sheets was responsible for many (most?) of the distinctive Home Savings buildings with sculpted motifs that graced California from the 1960s into the 1990s. Home Savings is no more, having been passed to Washington Mutual and then Chase. Many of the former Home Savings buildings have lost their former distinctiveness.

Ivan Albright: One Style Fits Forever

Ivan Albright (1897-1983) didn't paint every painting he made using the same style, but his best-known ones have nearly the same look. Moreover, they hewed to that look for much of his career. One of the subject labels for this post is "Adaptive Artists" and I'm using Albright as a counter-example, an artist who didn't seem to adapt much at all once he found a style that pleased him.

For whatever it's worth, Albright's paintings don't please me. While I appreciate that they are representational in an exaggerated sort of way, I find them morbid and ... what's the correct term-of-art? ... oh yes: icky.

Some paintings from different parts of his career.

Gallery

Into the World Came a Soul Named Ida - 1929-30

Self-Portrait - 1935

The Picture of Dorian Gray - 1943

The Vermonter - 1965-66

A Face from Georgia - 1974

Jack B., the Other Yeats

The grave in my photo above is that of William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), author, poet and sometime politician. It is in the yard of a Protestant church in Drumcliffe, County Sligo, Republic of Ireland. You might well have heard of him.

But I'm not sure many readers outside of Ireland know of his brother, Jack Butler Yeats (1871-1957) who, like their father, was a painter (Wikipedia entry here and further biographical information here). I wasn't aware of him until I visited the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin a short while ago where significant space was devoted to his works, perhaps in part because he was appointed Governor of the organization in 1939.

Yeats earned a living by illustration and cartooning until he was well into his 40s, though he began exhibiting paintings around 1906, according to Wikipedia. By the 1920s, while in his 50s, his style became increasingly influenced by Modernism, though he never quite embraced pure abstraction, so far as I can tell from a Google search of his images.

Here are some paintings from various parts of his career.

Gallery

Bachelor's Walk, In Memory - 1915
This shows flowers being placed in memory of a nationalist shot by British troops

In the Tram - 1923

The Liffey Swim - 1923
Two Dublin scenes painted the same year (the Liffey is a river flowing through the heart of Dublin). Yeats' style is becoming more free with less attention paid to shapes of the objects depicted.

O'Connell Bridge - 1927
Four years later, he features the Liffey again in a view from the main bridge crossing it. Further distortion of subject matter.

High Spring Tide - 1939
By the late 30s Yeats's style evolved to something like Impressionism where scenes were made up of tangles of brushstrokes of various colors.

Grief - 1951
Further evolution to the point that objects are difficult to distinguish at all.

Despite the great local attention devoted to Yeats' paintings, I found them unappealing messes, in particular those done from the late 1920s onward. But then, my ancestry is Irish at the very margin, so perhaps that's why I don't "get" his art.

Frantisek Kupka: Stylistic Gadfly

Just about any artist aspiring to become a professional faces the task of deciding what style or school to follow. This was particularly difficult for painters of the early 1900s who decided to commit to modernism in general, but faced a bewildering flurry of new schools and movements to choose from. So it was for Frantisek Kupka (1871-1957, Wikipedia entry here).

Kupka was born in Bohemia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and trained in art in Prague and Vienna before moving to Paris 1894 where his training concluded. He spent the rest of his long life in France. As it happened, his career-defining thirties decade largely coincided with the rise and, in many cases, decline of movements such as Fauvism, Blaue Reiter and Cubism. And in his early forties there was Futurism and the first abstract movements.

What to do?, he might well have asked himself. And his answer was to try as many movements as he could. Below are some examples of his work.

Gallery

Admiration - c.1899
This might have been an illustration because Kupka worked as an illustrator while establishing himself as a painter.

Self-Portrait - 1905
Not a traditional portrait, yet not modernist either. More of an advanced sketch or study. His left arm seems oddly positioned.

Portrait of the Artist with His Wife - completed 1908
A better version can be found on the Internet, but its size in kilobytes is too great to justify. I tried to adjust the colors from a smaller version, but they aren't right. In any case, this paintings seems stylistically a little older than 1908. Compare to the other 1908 painting below.

Lipstick - 1908
Now Kupka is into a mild form of expressionism. A watercolor from the same year, Profil de gigolette, looks even more like something Kees van Dongen might have painted.

Ruban Bleu - 1910
The colors are Fauvist, but the underlying drawing is still representational.

Mme. Kupka Among Verticals - 1911
Pure abstraction began appearing at this time. So Kupka has now almost caught up with the leaders of the avant-garde pack. Except he puts a representation of his wife in the upper-center.

Disks of Newton - 1912
This is in the Orphist/Synchromist mode of abstraction that burst forth around 1912.

Vertical and Diagonal Panes - c.1913
Another early abstraction, but using a different geometrical basis.

The Machine Drill - 1929
Charles Sheeler was starting to create industry-inspired images at about the same time. This Kupka painting indicates movement, so it also can be interpreted as a dying ember of Futurism.

Blowing Blues II - 1936
Kupka painted a number of paintings showing this sort of swirling, curving abstract design from around 1914 until much later in his career. Detours such as "The Machine Drill" seem to have been rare, so far as a Google searches indicate.

Adaptive Artists: Dean Cornwell

With this post I started an occasional series dealing with illustrators who preserved their careers by adjusting their style to suit changing illustration style fashions.

Now I consider Dean Cornwell (1892-1960), who is usually ranked among the top illustrators of the first half of the 20th century.

Cornwell reached prominence around 1920 and was hugely successful working in oil using a "painterly" style where brushstrokes are strong and visible. This style gradually fell out of favor during the 1930s when flashy watercolor work became the rage. In turn, this fashion was replaced in the wartime 1940s by sober oil paintings that had a more "finished" appearance where painterly qualities were subordinated.

It was in the 30s that Cornwell decided it was time to "play Shakespeare" (my term for wanting to become accepted as a legit fine artist) and began painting murals -- a quest that didn't net him much or any profit. He continued illustration to make ends meet, so adapted to the non-painterly approach of the 40s. As far as I know, he didn't buy into the 1950s "big head"/gouache style.

I'll be writing more about Cornwell later. If you want considerably more information right away, I suggest you get a copy of Illustration Magazine's issue number 23 that features Cornwell.

Here is an example of his work from the 20s and one from the 40s.

From 1921.

From "The Robe" - 1947.
I fully understand that you gotta do what you gotta do, and there was no way Cornwell could have survived had he continued the style of the top picture. That said, I really like his 1920s work and find later illustrations such as the lower picture undistinguished, generic work almost any competent illustrator of the time might have produced.

Adaptive Artists: Harold Von Schmidt

Some illustrators flash in the pan. Others can sustain a distinctive style for a decade or longer provided that style is in synch with the times.

David Apatoff has this post dealing with Henry Raleigh who made beautiful drawings that fit well with the 1920s high society zeitgeist and even worked for a while in the early 1930s. But the mode changed from drawing to splashy watercolors and then to solidly painted images. Raleigh's commissions dried up and he finally chose to kill himself.

His is clearly an extreme case of failure to adapt. So which illustrators took another path and had the knowledge and skills to preserve their careers by changing with the stylistic times? That's what this new Art Contrarian feature will consider. The plan is to present an early and a later illustration showing the selected illustrator's versatility; in some cases, additional images might be needed.

We begin with Harold Von Schmidt (1893-1982) who pursued a long career and made adjustments to maintain his pace. I should note that these adjustments were not as extreme as some that will be presented in later posts, despite the impression the illustrations below might suggest. Von Schmidt also protected his career by specializing in Western art, a perennial with a smallish, but devoted market.

A useful biographical sketch of Von Schmidt is here.

I'm not sure how long Von Schmidt worked in this style. It seems to date from the late 1920s, and he had moved on during the 30s.

Not a Western scene; this deals with the Korean War of the early 1950s. The differences in media and technique are almost as obvious as the contrasting subject matter.