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FRANK BRANGWYN'S STUDIES

When I recently posted a drawing by Frank Brangwyn (1867 - 1956), I was surprised to hear how Brangwyn-- once one of the most famous artists in the world-- had faded from memory.

Early in his career, Brangwyn was touted as "the Rembrandt of tomorrow." Then fashion took a sharp turn toward modernism, and Brangwyn quickly became yesterday's news.

One such modernist group, the Futurists, wrote a wonderful manifesto:

We want to deliver [art] from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries.

To admire an old picture is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn instead of casting it forward with violent spurts of creation and action. Do you want to waste the best part of your strength in a useless admiration of the past....?

For the dying, for invalids and for prisoners it may be all right. It is, perhaps, some sort of balm for their wounds, the admirable past, at a moment when the future is denied them. But we will have none of it, we, the young, strong and living Futurists!

I get a kick out of the Futurist manifesto, but on my little oasis in blogland we do not judge art on the basis of manifestoes, fashion trends or market statistics. Strip away the politics of the art establishment and judge these once again as pure drawing.

Just as with the studies of Edwin Austin Abbey, Brangwyn's working drawings enable you to see his talent in mid-flight. Note his theatrical instincts as he searches for just the right dramatic pose.

He ain't no Rembrandt, but there's a lot still to be learned from a great talent like this.

BEFORE THE BEGINNING, AFTER THE END

The starting point for art is our five senses. Yet sight, touch, and other senses are no help when it comes to one of the most powerful themes for art.

In his final play, Shakespeare laments, "Our little life is rounded with a sleep." That sleep-- vast, profound and impenetrable-- defeats artistic understanding. There are no colors or shapes or designs to portray it. In fact, the clues we receive from our meager senses usually end up making the artist look silly.

In Robert Frost's poem Home Burial, a mother wails at her inability to accompany and understand her dying child:
The nearest friends can go
With anyone to death, comes so far short,
They might as well not try to go at all
Perhaps for this reason, most artists satisfy themselves with depicting the observable detritus left behind, rather than trying to get any closer.

Artists who do try to explore what lies beyond consciousness usually get about as far as the veil:

The powerful painter Arnold Bocklin employed a similar device-- a distant island-- but the point is the same: no sneak previews allowed.

If art cannot help us see past the veil, what insight and consolation can it give us?

For me, one of the most successful efforts was George Herriman's lovely dialogue between Krazy Kat and the afterlife. Here, Krazy Kat uses an ouija board to seek the wisdom of the spirits on the other side of the veil.

Herriman's light and elegant touch combines profundity and humor. Most of all, his tenderness and humanity seem to me a far better response to our ignorance than the grim and ponderous approaches of Bocklin or Brueghel.

THE WATERCOLORS OF JOHN GANNAM

Some illustrators, such as Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper, went on to become famous in "fine art" circles for their amazing watercolors. John Gannam (1907 - 1965) remained an illustrator but his watercolors were still amazing.

Gannam's paintings adorned stories in popular magazines for many years. He also painted a popular series of advertisements for sheets and blankets.

Neither Winslow Homer nor Edward Hopper could hold a candle to Gannam when it came to portraying the deep emotional relationship between a housewife and her new blanket.

But don't be fooled. Look closely and you will see the work of a serious and accomplished watercolorist.

Many of Gannam's paintings were published in cropped form, accompanied by intrusive headlines and graphics like these:

But when you look at the originals, you see Gannam's mastery at work:

Little details like this row of flowers demonstrate how Gannam kept looking hard all the time. Gannam didn't use a rote formula or lapse into photorealistic tracing.

These watercolors could fit quite comfortably on the same wall with the work of Homer and Hopper.

ARTISTS IN LOVE, part ten

In both art and life, the sculptor Gaston Lachaise was famously devoted to his muse, Isabel.

Lachaise was working in Paris in 1901 when he first saw Isabel Nagle strolling through the gardens by the Seine. Isabel was a married woman on vacation from the United States. Lachaise later recalled, she “immediately became the primary inspiration which awakened my vision...."

The young artist appeared at her door every day until she agreed to let him draw her portrait. By the time she left Paris to return home to Boston, the couple was in love .

Lachaise could not live apart from Isabel. He gave up his friends and family in Paris, learned to speak English and followed her to Boston with just $30 in his pocket. There, he persuaded her to leave her husband, a conservative local businessman.

Gaston and Isabel fled strict Boston society to romp nude in the remote woods of Maine. They swam and frolicked in the phosphorescent sea at night. They wrote bad love poetry to each other (as is every couple's right). A sample from Gaston:
I sing my hymn to you,
You the goddess for whom I searched,
Whom I express in my every work,
Have made me a God.
Isabel and Gaston were married, and Gaston devoted his entire career to sculpting monuments to her ample belly, powerful haunches and pendulous breasts.

Years later he wrote, “through her the splendor of life was uncovered for me and the road of wonder began widening….” It must have been somewhere along that wider road that he started sculpting Isabel opened up like some giant fecund orchid.

I used to think Lachaise's art was pretty uncomplicated. Then I read that Isabel was in reality just five feet, two inches tall and weighed a mere 110 pounds. Whoa.

Oliver Sacks observed that "the world isn't given to us-- we make it with our nervous systems." In art as in love, what we bring to and invest in the object of our affection plays a significant role in what we perceive.

Lachaise did not simply copy Isabel as nature created her. Through her he distilled abstract shapes and contours of eros. Willa Cather once said we can find happiness by being "dissolved into something complete and great." As far as I can tell, Lachaise followed that formula to become a very happy guy.

The STUDIES OF EDWIN AUSTIN ABBEY

Many people know the work of Edwin Austin Abbey from his famous murals in the Boston library. Still more people know him for his slightly fussy pen and ink illustrations that were so popular in the 19th century.

However, if you want to see what Abbey is really made of, check out his wonderful sketches and studies.

Note in the drawing above how Abbey draws with his eraser as much as his charcoal, in order to create the right values.

I prefer these studies to most of his finished drawings. They are very revealing and they have a powerful, mystical feeling to them.

Very few people ever see these studies. Many are locked up in the Yale University collection. However, I think they are almost as important as the Boston murals themselves when it comes to appreciating Abbey as an artist.

CHEAP SENSATIONALISM OF THE OLD MASTERS

Cultured people are often offended by the vulgarity of illustration. Rocket ships blasting off, bombs exploding, damsels in distress-- such uncouth material could never qualify as fine art.

Yet, Homer, Chaucer and Shakespeare loved sex and violence just as much as the authors of lurid pulp magazines did. Simone Weil noted in her famous essay on Homer's Iliad, "The true hero, the true subject matter, the center of the Iliad is force." She could easily have written the same thing about a Superman comic book.

Many great artists have been fascinated by the aesthetic possibilities of force:

Explosion by Leonardo da Vinci, circa 1515

Leonardo da Vinci had a fondness for drawing explosions and cataclysms. His 16th century efforts to conjure up violent, powerful images seem almost quaint today. Here, Leonardo draws a picture of two battling armies:

Then he tries drawing a picture of a great big violent storm:

Then he says, "Ah, I know! How about if I draw two armies battling during a great big storm? That would really be cool!"

Leonardo's notion of power comes across as sweet and harmless measured by today's standards, but it was clearly not for lack of trying. If he had only known about exploding space ships, he would probably be drawing them right alongside Alex Raymond (above).

If you start disqualifying art due to uncouth subject matter, artists like Leonardo will end up in the dumpster alongside the illustrators. Better that we should focus on the quality of the image without getting caught up in censorious notions of suitable content.