Category Archives: Paintings

Without paintings we are nothing

Paris, 1897

Paintings, Photographs

Stieglitz at his best.


Click the image for details.

Interestingly, Harvard added this Alfred Stieglitz image to its collection as recently as 2010.

Two other great rain images in Paris come to mind.

HC-B’s eternal portrait of Alberto Giacometti on the Rue d’Aléma:

And Gustave Caillebotte’s peerless painting.

In case long time readers start thinking I’m pining for rain here in the southwestern desert of Phoenix, fear not. I got all I could handle during our recent month long tour of New England colleges and miss it not one whit. I chanced on the Stieglitz while perusing the excellent Harvard Art Museums site, one I strongly recommend.

Hopper in the Oval Office

Paintings

Good taste and judgment in a time devoid of both.

These two magnificent Hoppers were recently added to the Oval Office.

More about Hopper here. They say lots about what is great and good in our republic.

About those paintings? Here.

Lovely image by the appropriately named Chuck Kennedy of the White House staff.

Pierre Bonnard

Paintings

Rich and good.

The oft held belief that great painters have to suffer great poverty on the road to success is at best a poor generalization. None of the greats of the Renaissance were exactly struggling to put bread on the table, for they were busy turning down commissions. Jump to the late nineteenth century and for every starving Monet or Renoir you will find a wealthy Degas or Bonnard painting with genius and abandon while enjoying a life of comfort and plenty.

San Francisco’s Palace of Legion of Honor is holding the first west coast show of Pierre Bonnard’s (1867-1947) paintings and photographs in fifty years and it’s a fine summary of the artist’s best work, many pieces plucked from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

The canvases are well lit and captioned in something approaching readable font sizes, and while the miniscule photograph reproductions really should be larger (they are from Bonnard’s Kodak Brownie) they convey the sense of experimentation which is often seen in the paintings, limbs cut off at the edges of the canvas just as in many Degas works, the latter also a keen photographer.

It’s a fine show of beautiful work and strongly recommended.

iPhone6 snaps.

The Arnolfini Wedding

Paintings

The first recorded use of the fish eye lens.

If you had to choose the finest ‘photographic’ painting in London’s National Gallery, it would certainly be Caravaggio’s ‘Supper at Emmaus‘. No photographer has ever captured the moment so well.

And your second choice from that collection would surely be Botticelli’s ‘Portrait of a Young Man‘ for its singular focus and color pallette.

But the Arnolfini Wedding would not be far behind. Painted in 1434 it is the oldest of the three and arguably the most technically complex. It’s all there – advanced perspective, lighting to put Vermeer to shame, tight composition.

All the indicia of wealth are there – the fine clothing, the costly surroundings, the little dog, the fruit carelessly disposed at left. The man is in charge, dour as he may be, the spouse newly pregnant looking up to her man in supplication. She is so much property. But there is sublime magic here and it’s in the convex mirror which Jan van Eyck has cheekily included right in the center. Look closer.

The first vision is of the backs of his subjects. Look closer and you see van Eyck and his assistant. And van Eyck doubtless got paid for painting himself. Wonderful. And the cheeky bugger has signed it ‘van Eyck was here’.

What photograph ever accomplished as much?

Oklahoma!

Paintings, Photography

All that is good and great.

The screen was like nothing I could have imagined. It was simply vast. This was in 1956.

My dad had taken me to the Leicester Square Odeon cinema and the movie was Rodgers’s and Hammerstein’s Oklahoma! America. My first childhood inkling of my future home.

Back then actors had to sing (on pitch), act, dance, emote and generally be perfect to succeeed in Hollywood, and you can very much see survival of the fittest from the cornucopia of talent on display here, never less than in Shirley Jones (with her wonderful coloratura soprano) and Gordon McRae.

Yet maybe the greatest magic here is from that technological wonder of twentieth century film, Technicolor. Evidently there are two masters – a 2.55:1 on 35mm film and the real thing, the 2.20:1 70mm original. That’s the one I have and while sometimes characters are cut off at the edge of an already ultrawide image, the quality – today – is breathtaking. You can see just how wide 2.20:1 is from the black bars in the images below, taken from a standard 1.78:1 (16:9) TV screen.

I finally got me to watching it for the first time in 57 years, yes siree, and it is a wonder to behold. And how often can you say that a childhood memory is better today than it was over a half century ago? The widescreen images capture the vastness of the American prairie like no other system possibly could.


Shirley Jones and Gordon McRae.


Jones soliloquizes in gorgeous Technicolor.


Somehow she morphs to a much haughtier Bambi Linn at the start of the surreal dream sequence.


The dream sequence becomes a Western Can-Can with Rod Steiger, no less, with imagery Dali would approve.


Drama reminiscent of Géricault’s ‘The Raft of the Medusa‘.


Oklahoma!

An extraordinary accomplishment in American musical theater with cinematography, music, singing and dancing (choreographed by none other than Agnes de Mille) to die for.

Rodgers and Hammerstein at their very best.