Joseph Kleitsch

Laguna on a Cloudy Day, Joseph Kleitsch, a rarity in southern California.                  

Bougainvillea, Mission San Juan Capistrano,
Joseph Kleitsch

Having just returned from a full-length (of the state) ramble encompassing much of California, I came away impressed. I went prepared to be disappointed, even disgusted with the "state of affairs," but wasn't. California does not disappoint. First of all, if you don't like a particular area you can always go elsewhere in the state and find a very different environment. Of course, the current drought limits that possibility somewhat. At the moment the entire state is simply dry, though in some parts you'd hardly notice what with crop irrigation and lawn sprinklers. Naturally, we didn't see the entire state. There's simply too much of it, though we did stay in California longer than any other state we visited. Despite the maddening congestion of L.A. freeways, I liked southern California. Moving on up the coast, if you look to your left, there's nothing but wildly dramatic coastal landscape. If you look to your right, there's nothing but monotonous low mountains and vineyards--boring. San Francisco has a great bay, but it was a horrible place to build a city, even two-hundred years ago. Further north, you get the feeling you could be driving through any of a dozen other states.

 

This is what Kleitsch found in Laguna beach, ca. 1917.
(Virtually none of Kleitsch's paints bear dates.)

Joseph Kleitsch Self-portrait.

The one part of California we did not see was the area south of Los Angeles. However, having seen what we saw, it's not hard for me to understand why the Hungarian artist, Joseph Kleitsch, decided to leave Paris, Budapest, and Munich, where he'd studied art, and move there in 1920. He was thirty-eight years old. Though first settling in Chicago around 1912, where he met and married his wife, the windy city was bare-knuckles, dirty, industrial metropolis laden with crime and punishment. Despite its famed art institute and plenty of money to support would-be painters, it was no artist's paradise. Winters were harsh, and summers hardly any better. Specifically, Kleitsch wanted to live in the picturesque artists' colony of Laguna Beach (southern Orange County about halfway between L.A. and San Diego). If you're familiar with Laguna Beach today, it's still an artists' colony with no less than four major art festivals, as well as a respectable museum of California art and its own Laguna Beach Playhouse (theater). However, Laguna Beach today is a far cry from that which drew Joseph Kleitsch to California almost a hundred years ago. Of course, the same could be said of California in general. Today there's more of everything except land and, apparently, water. Especially there's more people, more tourists, more money, more hype, and lots and lots more condos and hotels. The Hotel Laguna Beach (above) was one of the few in 1917. Today, there are over thirty.

The Chicago Riverfront, Joseph Kleitsch
--definitely not what he came all the way from Europe to paint.

Ocean Front - Main Beach, Laguna, Joseph Kleitsch

Kleitsch died of a heart attack in 1931, so that means he lived there little more than ten years. Nonetheless, he saw the community at its best, in the midst of the "roaring" 20s and before the Great Depression had time to take its toll on art and artists of that area and era. The Laguna Beach Kleitsch knew looked much like his Ocean Front painting (left) and in a strange way, not too unlike the resort regions Kleitsch knew in Europe at the time. All of southern California, even now, has a very strong Spanish colonial ambiance, which Kleitsch, delighted in painting. He especially loved San Juan Capistrano (top, left).

The broad crescent of Laguna Beach is still there,
but Kleitsch might not want to live there today.

The Ambassador Hotel Swimming Pool,
Los Angeles, 1920s, Joseph Kleitsch

Californians loved Kleitsch too. He was an impressionist, and Californians, even today, love Impressionism. Moreover, having been schooled in Europe, Kleitsch was an especially talented and authentic one at that, as compared to Americans who often merely imitated the style based upon secondhand exposure to such works in museums. And while Kleitsch was most beloved for his southern California landscapes, he made quite a name for himself during his time in Chicago as well as Laguna Beach by painting portraits, including, in 1912, a family portrait for the then President of Mexico, Francisco Madero. And though he was considered an outstanding colorist, once you gain a certain level of competance, even allowing for his impressionist handling of those colors, it's difficult to rise above the portrait painting competition in any significant way. Kleitsch did not. His 1920s images of Laguna Beach, however, did rise above those of his peers. Two years after the artist died, his wife opened the Joseph Kleitsch Gallery in Laguna Beach, which still exists today. By the way, it's said they pay top dollar for old Kleitsch paintings, so if you live in that area, check the attic.



Laguna Cove, Joseph Kleitsch. This was the Laguna Beach he came to paint.

Mati Klarwein

Artist and Model, 1059-60, Mati Klarewein (he must be nearsighted).                 

It's possible I'm getting to be a little jaded when it comes to looking at the painter's art. I mean, after all, when you are a painter, have taught painting and a lot of what there is to know about painting for as long as I have, not to mention writing about art, and particularly painting, daily now going on four years, I suppose that's to be expected. I go to major museums and look around. Even skipping over that art and those eras for which I have little or no interest, I probably average looking at any one painting no more than a few seconds. I inevitably come away suffering from art overdose. However (there's always the "however") once in a while the work of an artist hits me and, to use a trite expression, bowls me over. Sometimes it's on the walls of a museum but Internet art can have the same effect. Usually it's the work of a recent artist (recently alive or recently dead) which would explain my not being familiar with their work. That happened today as I was digging around for an artist to tell you about. His name is Mati Klarwein, and unless you're a Miles Davis fan, or some other brand of jazz (or psychedelic rock), you're probably never seen his work or even heard his name. Well, I'm here to tell you, you should do both--Mati Klarwein--remember that name.
 

Miles Davis, Bitches Brew,
Mati Klarwein

Greg Allman Laid Back,
Mati Klarwein





Visually, Klarwein's work, as they say, "knocks your eyes out," though I don't claim to understand a tenth of what I see on his canvases.  And it's not because he's an abstractionist, though there is that element in his work at times. No, I recognize most of what I see, I just don't identify with the relationshps and the juxtaposition of what I see...and there certainly is a LOT to see. I first noticed a number of African influences in his work, and since most of his album covers were for jazz artists or hard rockers I assumed him to be black. He was not. That will teach me not to stereotype. As is very often the case, a little personal background helps a lot, though it's not what I'd expected--more misplaced stereotyping.

Camouflage, 1985-87, Mati Klarwein

Still-life with Milk and Water, 1956, Mati Klarwein

Matias Klarwein was German, born in Hamburg in 1932. His mother was an opera singer, his father a Bauhaus architect. They're also Jewish--smart Jews with sense enough to get out of Germany while it was still possible, heading for the British mandate of Palestine with their two-year-old son in 1934. In 1948, when Israel became a nation, the family moved to Paris where their then sixteen-year-old son could study art at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Academie Julian. There he studied under Fernand Leger. Even though he was Jewish, Klarwein was sympathetic with the plight of the Palestinians back in his homeland. He even went to far as to give himself an Arab first name--Abdul. Following art school, he and a female companion traveled around the world, assimilating the art and culture wherever they went (which would explain my difficulty in stereotyping the artist by what I saw in his work).

The Schulte Family, 1989, Mati Klarwein--a surreal family outing to...I give up.

John F. Kennedy, 1964, Mati Klarwein.

Eventually, Klarwein settled in New York where he rubbed shoulders with recording artists such as Jimmy Hendrix and his "spiritual father," Salvador Dali. Though Klarwein wasn't exclusively a surrealist, the Dali influence is unmistakable in virtually all his work. Basically, Klarwein's paintings can be broken down into four categories--visionary, landscapes, portraits, and still-lifes. He combined the last two in his Artist and Model (top) from 1959-60. His still-lifes are straight forward, often nearly tromp l'oel (above, left) while his portraits range from funky to photographic. His landscapes tend toward the surreal. But it's his "visionary" work that seems most astounding and the most resistant even to analysis, much less understanding. One of his first such works, Flight to Egypt (below), from 1959-61 is nearly overwhelming--Dali on a rampage having overdoses on steroids.

Flight to Egypt, 1959-60, Mati Klarwein

Although probably best known for his album covers starting in the psychedelic 1970s, Klarwein also did a cover for Time magazine. In later years, the artist turned his attention more and more to landscapes and portraits, rendering images of such notables as Robert Graves, Noël Coward, Juliette Binoche, Richard Gere, Michael Douglas and Brigitte Bardot. He divided his time between homes in New York and Majorica where he died of cancer in 2002.

Topographical Error, 1983, Mati Klarwein. Love the title.

 

Raphael Kirchner

French postcards from Kirchner's 1899 "Clover" series. Notice the valentine hearts
floating in amongst the St. Patrick's Day clover. His early work was pretty tame stuff.

Raphael Kirchner

Like many today, who grew up during the halcyon days of the 1950s in America, my knowledge of all things sexual was about equal to my knowledge of all things arty--rudimentary, at best. I was well into high school before I caught a glimpse in study hall of a pornographic playing card some kid had. I was over twenty-one before a ever read an erotic novel. (Does Peyton Place count?) Such things simply weren't available to kids, at least not in the "God's country" of southeastern Ohio. About the raciest such printed items I knew of were French postcards...not that I'd ever actually seen one, I was just aware of them from reading about them, I guess, though I don't recall where and when, even at that. Although artists such as Rembrandt, Rubens, and others long ago made somewhat more than pocket change from etching and selling erotic prints "under the counter," it wasn't until around 1900 with the advent of color lithography, that such things surfaced to become a threat to the "moral fiber" of society. However, given the moral fiber of French society at the time, it was probably more a reflection than a threat. Several left-bank "starving artists" were involved in the trade, but one of the best and most important was a transplanted Austrian portrait painter named Raphael Kirchner.

Girls with Flowers (series), 1902, Raphael Kirchner--how sweet.

1913, Alluring, but tame compared
to later issues during the war.

Kirchner didn't start out to paint and draw racy French postcards. In fact, his earliest ones, dating from 1899 (top) were downright chaste...even by French standards of the day. I first encountered Kirchner's work as I researched a piece I did on Vienna, Austria, a couple days ago. Kirchner was born in Vienna, in 1876 where, twenty years later, he attended the Academy of Fine Arts. Following graduation, the artist moved to Paris, at the time pretty much the center of the European art world. There he got his start doing illustrations for the French weekly news magazine, La Vie Parisienne (right). The magazine was pretty much a typical news stand publication not unlike dozens of others competing for the attention of the Parisian news hounds around the turn of the century. However, when the publishers sold it in 1905 to a new owner, the magazine changed its focus from "hard" news to the "fun and frivolity" of the Paris art, music, and fashion scene with classy art, cartoons, and most of all, beautiful young ladies. As the magazine changed, so did Kirchner's contributions to it. Within five years, the "beautiful young ladies" gradually began to eschew their "fashions", making it one of the earliest "girly" magazines in Europe, perhaps the world.


They Mayflies series, 1904

The Girl Cyclist series, 1899

From brown to blond was not an ad
for hair dye. I wonder how many
postcards you got for twelve francs.

The problem was, such magazines were expensive, becoming more so as their "readership" grew to the point that when the American dough boys arrived in Paris to help fight WW I, their General, John J. Pershing, warned them not to buy such trash. Of course, that immediately made the publication immensely popular among servicemen deprived of their sweethearts back home. Long before the war, though, Kirchner was among the first to realize that there was money to be made by purveying the came content as his employer's magazine in pocket-size form for pocket-size change (left). Kirchner though, being a successful artist, was also a man of taste. Unlike others selling the similar printed material, most of Kirchner's postcards were hardly more than suggestive, a far cry from the eroticism and outright photographic pornography of his competitors on the streets of Paris. Initially at least, his postcards, once soldiers tired of them, could actually be sent home to their sweethearts, though some men made a point of collecting as many as they could, often numbering well into the hundreds.

Kirchner's "Geisha" series, ca. 1905-10

Sweet Smoke, 1913,
Raphael Kirchner. Most from this
period were somewhat nakeder.

Actually, Kirchner's postcard images began about the same time as his work for La Vie Parisienne, and were often centered around holidays (two holidays as in the case of the samples seen at top). Eventually, as competition grew, and publishers gradually began demanding more and more cleavage, more leg, and finally the sanitized nudity French painters had long been entering in Paris' Salon competition, Kirchner and other succumbed to the image we now have of the "dirty pictures" of French origin. Sweet Smoke (right), from 1913, is no longer what a lonesome soldier would send his girl back home. (This one was about as "tame" as any I could find from this period.) Perhaps the most interesting element in Kirchner's work is that he usually used his wife as a model. Though he created several "sets" or series of similar images, Kirchner's "Geisha" series became his most popular, racking up sales in the neighborhood of 40,000 copies. One result was that after the war, the veterans brought Kirchner's "ladies" back to the U.S. at which time they became the impetus for the calendar "pinup," still popular on the walls of gas stations and garages as late as when I was a kid.

By the time the war broke out, Kirchner's girls weren't so demure. For some reason, he considered smoking to be sexy. It's a habit shared by many of his madamoiselles.

Flo Ziegfeld liked Kirchner's work.

By the time WW I broke out around 1914, Kirchner could well afford to emigrate to the safety of New York where he and his wife did pretty well, painting portraits, designing costumes for the musical theater, and making sexy posters for its "frenchy" Broadway productions, like the Ziegfeld's Follies (right). In fleeing to New York, Kirchner apparently left the seductive postcard business to others with less refined tastes. In New York, Kirchner tried his hand briefly at sculpting shortly before his death in 1917 at the age of forty-one. After her husband's death, his wife, Nina, attempted suicide and had to be institutionalized. Unlike most of his competitors in the postcard business, Kirchner not only became "collectible" but influential, particularly with regard to the work of Alberto Vargas (below). Even given my sheltered upbringing, thanks to Esquire and later, Hugh Hefner, Vargas was one artist with whom I was familiar.

By WW II, Alberto Vargas, under the influence of Raphael Kirchner, was keeping our servicemen all over the world "happy."

 

Anselm Kiefer

Lot's Wife, 1989, Anselm Kiefer

Ansellm Kiefer, Self-portrait, 1970

I don't know if anyone else has ever had this experience but it happens to me at least once during every outing I've ever made to a major art museum.  You see a painting. You don't know the artist. You don't know for sure what you're looking at, but something tells you it's an important work, though it's difficult to say precisely why you might think so. In my experience, usually the work is abstract in nature, though usually not non-representational. In some cases, checking out the title on the little plate beside the painting (this seldom has to do with sculpture) helps, but as often as not artists aren't so obliging. Most recently, this recurring moment happened to me in visiting the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), and encountering the work of Anselm Kiefer, a German-born Expressionist now living in Paris. The painting was Lot's Wife (top), dating from 1989. The cold, desolate landscape, grounded in abandoned railroad tracks seemed to have little or nothing to do with either the biblical Lot or his salty wife. I stared at it for a little longer than I might have other such paintings, but moved on no more or less enlightened than before. More recently I've looked up Kiefer and his work only to discover, virtually all of his work strikes me much the same as Lot's Wife.

 

Winterland, 2010, Anselm Kiefer

Winter Landscape, 1970, Anselm Kiefer

Here's where it pays to know something about the artist in understanding their work. Anselm Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen, southern Germany (along the Swiss border), in 1945 about the time the war ended. He first studied law and Romance languages before switching to art, studying first in Freiburg, then Karlsruhe, and finally Düsseldorf where he studied under Peter Dreher, a Realist figurative painter. Despite studying painting, Kiefer began as a photographer, intent in his work on not letting Germans forget the xenophobic past under the Third Reich. During the 1970s, as he continued his studies, Kiefer began to work with all manner of foreign materials applied to his ever larger and larger canvases. He began using straw with great success as well as oils, emulsion, acrylics, shellac, ash, torn bushes, synthetic teeth and snake skin on canvases framed in glass and steel, as seen in his Winterland (above), dating from 2010, and his Margarete (below) from 1981, almost thirty years earlier.

 

Margarete, 1981, Anselm Kiefer
--materials more likely to come from a lumber yard or a junkyard than from Dick Blick.




Wurzel Jesse, 2006, Anselm Kiefer

I think what "teases" me about Kiefer is his flirting and flitting back and forth between realism and abstraction. In viewing most Abstract Expressionism, whether one realizes it or not, the mind first seeks to identify representations of real scenes or objects, if only for a second or two. With Kiefer, that instinctive effort takes longer in that Kiefer often imposes a great degree of representational order upon his straw, weeds, snake skins and acrylic paints sealed beneath his various emulsions and shellacs. Margarete (above) suggests white doves roosting among hospitable giraffes made all the more disquieting by his penchant for sometimes scripting the title of his work right in the middle of his work. Kiefer's 2006 Wurzel Jesse (right), leaves me wondering, am I failing to recognize something, or is there simply nothing there to recognize? The title certainly doesn't help.

Siegfried's Difficult Way to Brunhilde, Anselm Kiefer. In many ways, his paintings bear a strong resemblance to his early photographs capturing the scars of war.

Man Under a Pyramid, 1996, Anselm Kiefer

On a superficial level, Kiefer dotes on one-point perspective, even in many of his abstract pieces. As seen in his Man Under a Pyramid (right) from 1996, he's also fond of stacking things, especially within his glass-caged sculptures. His landscapes are rich but lonely. Seldom do human figures impose themselves into his work except perhaps in a most abstractly circumspect manner, appearing more ghostly or spiritual (if there's any difference between the two) than real. Whether tied directly to Hitler's Holocaust, or the more general death and destruction suffered by his ancestors from virtually every era, Kiefer seems constantly to remind the German nation that they have long been one of the most hostile, warlike ethnicities since the beginnings of recorded history. In their cold, textural purity, Kiefer's painted strokes speak of strength and a strident struggle as ingrained as his straw and straight stretches of stony silence.

Deutschlands Geisteshelden (Germany’s Spiritual Heroes), 1973, Anselm Kiefer 

Resurrexit, 1973, Anselm Kiefer

Unlike the work of many painters today, Kiefer's paintings have depth, not just as I've outlined above, but in terms of their historic, social, and psychological content. At a time when so much non-representation work is, at best, synthetic (pretty, but also pretty meaningless), even if you and I don't fully understand these elements, we see, or at least suspect, that they are present. When there is obvious realism, it's imbued with texture and illusionary depth that transcends the content just as it does in his more abstract work. One of Kiefer's earliest works, his 1973 Resurrexit (left) and later his Deutschlands Geisteshelden (above: Germany’s Spiritual Heroes), dating all the way back to 1973, bear the traits of Peter Dreher, his major influence at the time. The "tunnel vision" and emptiness is as disturbing as it is insightful. Germany had no spiritual heroes.

Renaissance cities: Vienna, Austria

The some of the artists who made Vienna famous: Joseph Haydn, Ludwig von Beethoven, Wolfgang Mozart, Johann Bach, Johann Strauss, Franz Schubert, Johannes Brahms.
Not one of them could paint a stroke.



Another artist who made Vienna famous,
Gustave Klimt, The Kiss, 1907.

This morning as I began searching for some topic upon which to expound, it occurred to me I'd not written about any Renaissance cities in quite some time.  And inasmuch as I had written about the Dutch "Golden Age." of painting quite frequently in recent months, I thought it appropriate to write about Amsterdam where it all began. As I was pulling together photos and other resources I began having a feeling of deja-vu. A few minutes later I realized, hey, this is more than deja-vu. I checked the on-site search feature (above, upper-left corner) and sure enough, I'd literally "been there, done that." So I thumped my forehead and decided I was in danger of running out of ancient, European cultural centers. Then it occurred to me I'd never written about "the city of music," sometimes called "the city of dreams" (Freud lived and worked there all his life). Whatever the case, the Viennese and the Austrians should feel slighted. I've written already about other cities far less important. I suppose I've missed Vienna in that I'm not a great classical music lover nor much of a psychoanalyst. But Vienna had art...art and architecture too, and lots and lots of history.

 

Vienna, 1547. Note the moat. (Zoom in, the map is very high resolution.)

T

The Old Burgtheater,1888-89, Gustav Klimt

The area in and around present-day Vienna (Wien to the natives) has seen human occupation since around 500 BC. That puts it in the same league with Rome, Athens, and few other of the oldest cities in Europe. The Romans fortified an encampment there as a northern outpost to defend against the Germanic tribes. The Babenberg family claimed dominion over the Danube around 976 A.D when all of Europe was a battling bunch of barbarian duchies almost too numerous to count. The area around Vienna was the Duchy of Austria. As generation after generation passed, the Babenbergs extended their area of influence westward to include much of Austria and the surrounding area. In 1440, the Hapsburg family picked up where they left off, becoming the Holy Roman Empire with Vienna as its capital. Of course that designation may be the biggest misnomer in the history of misnomers. There was nothing "holy" about it; they were far from being Roman, and as empires go, it really wasn't much of one. In any case, for the next two-hundred years or so, this "empire" found itself on the front line battling assaults from the Muslim Ottoman Turks. Vienna survived two separate sieges to become the northern-most limit of the Ottoman Empire. Vienna's encircling moat and massive ramparts were far less successful in battling off the rats invading the city bearing the Black Plague, which took out a third of Vienna's population in 1679 alone.

The Vienna State Opera, 1907-08, Adolph Hitler

Vienna today. The many parks (in green) were
once part of the moat which surrounded the city.

First and foremost, Vienna is famous for its composers and their musical accompaniment, which means it's famous for its opera houses and theaters. In his younger days, Gustav Klimt painted the most famous of these, The Old Burgtheater (above, right) around 1888. Another equally famous artist (infamous, actually), Adolph Hitler, also in his younger days at the time (1907-08), painted the Vienna State Opera House (above) in an attempt to gain entrance into the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. Twice he was rejected. Broke, he returned to Munich where he took up politics. Vienna is also famous for its palaces. As the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from 1804 until after WW I, and before that, the Hapsburg's homestead, Vienna has more than its share of Classical, Baroque, and Rococo palaces beginning with the Hofburg (dating from 1279), The Schönbrunn Palace (dating from 1548), and the Lower and Upper Belvedere Palaces (1696 and 1707). The Upper Belvedere now houses an art museum, one of over a hundred art museums in the Vienna area.

Vienna's Schonbrunn Palace, like Versailles, grew from a royal hunting lodge.
Those Hapsburgs sure knew how to live.

Although the list of Viennese artists is nowhere near as illustrious as that of its composers, besides Klimt and that Adolph guy, it does have a wide variety of artists with an even wider variety of styles and content. The walls of Vienna's many museums boast the works of Austrian artists and architects such as Oskar Kokoschka, Otto Wagner, Friedrich von Amerling, Rudolf von Alt, Ferdinand Bauer, Josef Abel, and other too numerous (or insignificant) to mention. Vienna also boasts its famed Spanish Riding School, its Boys Choir, St. Stephens Cathedral (and numerous other religious edifices).

The map of Austria reminds me of a campfire where eight or nine friends and former enemies sit around roasting "wieners."

Vienna's wiener schnitzel

Sitting smack in the middle of Eastern Europe, Vienna is bordered by no less than eight other countries (above, almost nine if you count nearby Croatia). Besides Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, all the others were once part of Austria's mighty empire which included today's Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Slovenia, much of Croatia, and tiny Liechtenstein. Though German speaking, Vienna has a very international flavor as might be expected when cities such as Munich, Nuremberg, Dresden, Augsburg, Stuttgart, Zagreb, Bratislava, Zurich, Trieste, Budapest, and Prague, are all within a day's drive. Speaking of flavor, we mustn't skip over the cuisine, including Vienna's namesake coffee, its wiener schnitzel (right), apple strudel, and of course, its sausages. Its most famous, the wiener (German for Viennese), for some unfathomable reason, is referred to by the locals as a frankfurter.

The Hofball in Vienna, 1900, Wilhelm Gause, home of the Viennese Waltz--
boy, do they ever (Vienna hosts over 200 balls per year).