The Most Successful Artist of All Time

If you were asked to name the most successful American artist of all time, who would it be. Forget about defining "success", he would undoubtedly lead by most every definition. Play a little guessing game here with me (no fair scrolling down to peek). He was born in 1901 in Chicago. His father was a not-very-successful Canadian-born building contractor. His mother sometimes went out and worked with her husband's employees. In 1906 they gave up the family business to try farming. It was there our young artist did his first paid work, a drawing in crayon of their doctor's horse for which he earned 5 cents. By 1910, they were forced to sell the farm and move to Kansas City where our budding young artist managed a newspaper route while studying at the Kansas City Art Institute. He was 14.   
   
In high school, he contributed cartoon drawings to the school newspaper before enlisting in the war effort as an ambulance driver, eventually being station in Paris and soaking up a bit of the French art scene. Back home after the war, he was determined to make a career in commercial art. In time, he found himself working for a small Kansas City film company where he pioneered many ground breaking animation techniques. In the early 1920's, he founded his own company. By 1923 the company was broke and our artist and would-be entrepreneur was on a train to California. There he founded a similar, somewhat more successful enterprise. Today that company is worth upwards to 100 billion dollars.  
   

The original theater release
poster from 1940

Well, if you haven't guessed by now, our artist-turned-film-maker-turned-entrepreneur was Walter Elias Disney. Though he never did much in the way of drawing after his friend, Mickey, made it big in 1928, his imagination, creative genius, leadership, and sheer will-power drove a team of artist, painters, musicians, cinematographers, actors, writers, and (his own word) "imagineers" to create an entertainment powerhouse with animated fingers in just about every leisure-time pursuit imaginable. His feature films represent a line of classics stretching from the ground-breaking Snow White to the latest Winnie the Pooh and Captain America (a cartoon character but not a cartoon). My own all-time favorite--the original Fantasia. While an artistic masterpiece it was a big-time loser at the box-office. It took some 35 years to show a profit, becoming successful only after Disney's death in 1966. Today, though the film is more than 70 years old, it continues to be an artistic high-water mark, marrying the best of painting, music, and film-making into a wondrously exciting work of art that stands alone in its genre.

Felix Vallotton

Landscape of Ruins and Fires, 1914. Felix Vallotton

It's hard for a young artist to guess the ultimate direction of his or her career; how their work will be treated by critics, the buying public, and art connoisseurs both during, and especially after their lifetime. Part of this is sheer serendipity. Much has to do with critical decisions artists make as to where they live, their marriage (singular or plural), the friends they make, people they encounter, and causes they embrace. It has to do with world events as well--wars, economic disasters, political upheavals, and most of all how the artists react to all these things. It has to do with their health as well, personal habits, and general demeanor. All of these things are quite apart from the artist's actual creative output, their style, their choice of media, the quantity and quality of their work, and their knack for self-promotion. Some elements the artist has a modicum of control over, but they are all intermingled to such a degree as to cause the artist's legacy to be, not totally, but virtually unpredictable. That could certainly be the case with the Swiss-French painter, Felix Vallotton.

 

Felix Vallotton, age twenty (top-left), to sixty (bottom-right).

Felix Edouard Vallotton was born into a conservative, middle-class family in Lausanne, (western Switzerland) where he attended Collège Cantonal, graduating with a degree in classical studies in 1882 at the age of seventeen. Though obviously a "quick study," there is nothing in that to suggest the man would become well-known, or even that he would become an artist. The best that could be said was that his formal education put him good stead for his decision that same year to move to Paris and study to be an artist. He landed at the Academie Julian under the watchful eyes of Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger. The former was a better painter than he was an instructor; the latter just the opposite; both nonetheless steeped in the traditional academic straight-jacket worn by the vast majority of French artist of their era. Actually, Vallotton probably spent more hours in the Louvre, studying the old masters, especially Holbein, Durer, and Ingres, than he did in class.


Portrait of Monsieur Ursenbach, 1885, Felix Vallotton

In any case, after a mere three years of study, in 1885, at the tender age of twenty, Vallotton painted two portraits, the first of himself (above, top-left), the second a Portrait of Monsieur Ursenbach (above). Both are outstanding, not just for a young art student, but as compared to the work of virtually any portrait artist working in Paris at the time. Vallotton's self-portrait received an honorable mention at the Paris Salon of 1886. Judging by such prodigious talent and critical acclaim, one might guess the young man to be well on his way to a long and prosperous career as a leading Paris portrait artist. One would be wrong. Oh, he was modestly successful in the years following his initial studies at Julian, but mostly he lived by writing as an art critic and teaching classes.

The Patient, 1892, Felix Vallotton

Portrait of Paul Verlaine
(woodcut), 1891, Felix Vallotton

Then, in 1891, Felix Vallotton made his first woodcut, a Portrait of Paul Verlaine (left). Even though he was an accomplished artist with a brush, as seen in the genre painting The Patient (above), from 1892, Vallotton quickly decided he loved etching grooves in wood more than daubing oils on canvas. In the western world, the relief print, in the form of commercial wood engraving, had long been utilized mainly as a means to accurately reproduce drawings, painted images, and, by Vallotton's time, photographs. Vallotton's woodcut style was unique in its starkly reductive opposition of large masses of undifferentiated black and areas of unmodulated white. Vallotton emphasized outline and flat patterns, generally eliminating the gradations and modeling traditionally produced by cross-hatching. He was influenced by post-Impressionism, Symbolism, and especially by Japanese woodcuts.

Vallotton did woodcut images of virtually all the major artists, writers, and thinkers of his day.

For a single decade at the end of the 19th-century Félix Vallotton became famous, not as a painter (Paris was overflowing with painters at the time), but above all else as a print maker. Vallotton’s bold approach to the woodcut is credited by many art historians of his time, and still today, as having modernized and revitalized the art form in the Western world. Vallotton's woodcut subjects included domestic scenes, bathing women, portrait heads (above), and images of street crowds; most notably, scenes of police attacking anarchists. He usually depicted types rather than individuals, eschewed the expression of strong emotion, blending graphic wit with an acerbic, ironic sense of humor. His La Paresse (below), from 1896, is an interesting example.

La Paresse  (which translates as Laziness), 1896, Felix Vallotton

Portrait de Gabrielle Vallotton,
1908, Felix Vallotton

Vallotton's woodcuts were widely published in books and periodicals all over Europe as well as the United States, and are said to have been a significant influence on the graphic art of Edvard Munch, Aubrey Beardsley, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. Around 1892 Vallotton became affiliated with Les Nabis, a group of young artists that included among others, Pierre Bonnard, Maurice Denis, and Édouard Vuillard. During the 1890s, when Vallotton was closely allied with the avant-garde, his paintings reflected the style of his woodcuts, with flat areas of color, hard edges, and simplification of detail. In 1899 Vallotton married an attractive, wealthy widow with three children, Gabrielle Rodrigues-Henriquez (left), thus enabling him to obtained French citizenship. About the same time, no longer obliged to eke out a livelihood at printmaking Vallotton began to once more concentrated on painting, developing a sober, often bitter realism independent of the artistic mainstream. His Portrait of Gertrude Stein (top-right in the group below) dates from 1907 and was painted as an apparent response to Picasso's portrait of her the previous year. Vallotton is said to have started at the top and methodically worked his way to the bottom in painting it.

The Artist's Wife (top-left), Gertrude Stein (top-right), the Nabis painters, Bonnard, Vuillard,
Roussel, Cottet and Vallotton, from 1902, (midway down on the left), Emile Zola from 1909
(lower-right), and the artist's parents (bottom-left).

Vallotton responded to the coming of war in Europe in 1914 by volunteering for the French army, though by that time almost fifty years of age, he was rejected. Eventually he did make it to the Champagne front in 1917, on a commission from the Ministry of Fine Arts. The sketches he produced became the basis for a group of paintings not unlike an earlier work, Landscape of Ruins and Fires (top), dating from 1914. After the war, In his final years of his life, Vallotton concentrated especially on still lifes (below). He died in 1925 on the day after his 60th birthday, following cancer surgery in Paris. Vallotton was a highly prolific artist. By the time of his death, he had completed over 1700 paintings and about 200 prints, in addition to hundreds of drawings and several sculptures. Yet, despite the lopsided numbers, Vallotton's legacy finds him most remembered for his woodcut prints rather than his paintings.

Virtually all of Vallotton's still-lifes involved food.

Sunset, 1925, Felix Vallotton--his final painting.

Self-portrait profile (woodcut),
1895, Felix Vallotton

 

Naza

Red Macaw, Naza                                      

Naza with her Blue Macaw.

If and when an artist today rises to become an internationally known entity, it goes without saying that he or she packs along a significant body of exceptional work. But, as literally thousands of professional artist today can attest, neither quantity nor quality alone are enough to attain international or even national acclaim. Other traits are critically important. Two of the most important and persistence--single-minded pursuit of a definite set of goals. The second is personality--friendly, outgoing, and forthright. These two traits come down to hard work and shameless self-promotion. The successful artist must work daily, pouring out as much studio time as their constitution (and family responsibilities) permit, while at the same time actively pursuing media coverage of all kinds to gain name recognition, style recognition, and critical recognition from whatever sources possible. Even the best technique and the most grueling work schedule won't suffice without this second factor. Moreover, it's the one endeavor in which most artists find themselves lacking. Some have been known to give up a promising career having come to hate this one aspect. Others love it; others such as the Brazilian artist, Maria Nazareth Maia Rufino McFarren, better known as Naza (short for Nazareth) seem to thrive on it.



Peaceful Woman, Naza--softly abstract.

Naza calls her style "abstract realism." At first glance, that sounds like a conflict of terms, and in the purist sense, it is. However, if you stretch the definition of each term a bit then the degrees of each overlap--not completely real (nothing really is) and not completely abstract (few things are). Her content is usually identifiable, yet as seen in her Peaceful Woman (above) and American Brazilian (below), there is the illusion of surface layer distortions that give the image an abstract quality. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, but in any case it's distinctively Naza, and combined with her love of color and vaguely Brazilian content, the overall effect can be stunning.

 

American Brazilian, Naza



Stolen art, the unfortunate mark
 of a successful artist.

Naza was born in 1955, growing up in a northeastern costal area of Brazil, just south of the mouth of the Amazon in an area way too hot and humid for my taste. She started painting about 1979 while working in various service jobs to support herself and her daughter. A job working for the Bank of Brazil in Picos allowed her to travel about exhibiting in local art shows and accepting portrait commissions. Her early work, except for the portraits, is somewhat more abstract than her work today. During this time she met and married her husband, an American named Stuart McFarren. Their son was born while the couple lived in Panama. Then, a year later, they moved to Arlington Virginia about 1988. They've lived in various parts of the U.S. since, currently dividing their time between homes in San Francisco and Boca Raton, Florida, as well as a home in Brazil.

 

Zebra, Naza--wildlife, both human and animal.

Is that a self-portrait?

After several years of moving frequently and filling various positions at art instructor or teacher of Portuguese, Naza and her family settle in in Boca Raton, Florida where she opened an art gallery and became intimately involved it the wealthy social circles allowing her to paint portraits of celebrities such as Ivana Trump, Debbie Gibson, David Carradine and Dan Haggerty. (Keep in mind these were celebrities some twenty-five years ago.) Since then Naza and her paintings have been the subject of a book, O Figurativo Abstrato de Naza (Abstracted Realism by Naza), while also starting her own line of clothing based upon her paintings (bottom left and right). She has also been called upon to design magazine covers (left) and other print material. She's even had a painting stolen (above right). Since 2007 Naza has lived most of the year in Brazil where her clothes are manufactured. In 2013 she opened her first retail clothing outlet, Naza Art & Fashion store, in Porto de Galinhas, Ipojuca, PE, Brazil.

Fashionable art

Wearable art

Naza is living proof that the artist with talent can magnify their skills with an exceptional work ethic coupled with a knack for pursuing every possible opportunity to exploit them and expose them to those most likely to appreciate such things. As disagreeable as most artist may find such endeavors, there's a lot to be said for "shameless self-promotion."



Portrait of Ohio Astronaut, John Glenn, Naza
--Abstract Realism

 

Famous Artists School

America's most famous artist from the Famous Artists School ad
(some more famous than others).

Very few future artists growing up in the 1950s and 60s were unaware of the "fabulous opportunities" that would come there way if only they could scrape together $300 to enroll in the famous Famous Artists School. If you're thinking of matchbook covers with a cute little clown, pirate, or pooch drawing above the words "Draw Me," you've got the wrong school. That was Minnesota's Art Instruction Schools. The Famous Artists School of Westport, Connecticut, never stooped quite so low in their advertising. Instead they featured half-page magazine adds of their "famous artists" at work. Except for Norman Rockwell, few people had ever heard of any of them at the time. Would-be artists simply had to take the word of the school's founder, Albert Dorne, that his list of co-founders were, in fact, famous. Of course, until the magazine ads began appearing around 1948, few people had heard of the artist/illustrator, Albert Dorne, either.



The founder and face of Famous Artist's School, Al Dorne.
His eyebrows may have been even more famous.

An early ad by Al Dorne for Johnnie Walker.
Can you imagine the uproar if such a jolly group of
drunk drivers appeared today? MADD would be mad.

Albert Dorne was living, breathing proof at the time that you could study art at home and become a successful artist. He features his rags-to-riches story prominently in all his schools promotional material, and it was more or less true...mostly. Born in 1906, Dorne grew up in New York City's hard-scrabble East Side. He tried his luck at such vibrant careers as newsboy, office boy, even a brief stint at boxing before serving five years as an apprentice to New York illustrator, Saul Tepper (not exactly a famous artist). That was the extent of his "formal" art education. Yet, by the 1940s, he was one of the highest paid illustrators in the country making upwards to $50,000 per year (close to a half-million in today's art circles).

 

The Famous Artists--Norman Rockwell is featured with the largest painting (center) while Dorne reclines (sans jacket) at the bottom, center.

The famous talent test, the school's
foot inside the front door in
praising (but not appraising) talent.

After the war, copying the success of the Art Instruction Schools (founded in 1914), Dorne recruited eleven other successful artist/illustrators to create, along with himself, a series of art correspondence courses covering Painting, Illustration/Design, and Cartooning. Aside from their names and some financial interest, these artists contributed illustrations and instructional guidance in their particular area of strength. They never were true faculty members in the academic sense. Each had far more lucrative things to do and art instructors capable of grading and criticizing mailed-in student work were, at that time, a dime a dozen. The enterprise grew to be such a success that, at it's peak in the 1950s, had over 40,000 students. Each had taken an art test (as did I), submitted it for a "free" scholarship competition only to encounter, a few weeks later, a school representative (read salesman) knocking at their door, praising their talent, and boasting of the highly paid jobs and opportunities awaiting those who graduated from the "school" (such as getting to work with famous celebrities).

 





Norman Rockwell "wrote the book" on faces, this lesson based upon his famous Gossip cover for the Saturday Evening Post (below, left). The instructional material was actually quite thorough and well-written.
The problem was, there was too much of it for most student artists.

Recycling old art to new purposes
as with this 1958 Post cover.

Of course no one ever flunked the test. And, like so many others, our family could little spare the then astronomical sum of $300 payable in monthly payments. (This would have been about 1960 when I was fifteen). The key element in Dorne's business plan was that fewer than ten percent of all students who began such an undertaking ever finished the proscribed 24 lessons in each course, and fewer still ever gained entrance into an art career (much less met any celebrities or became rich and famous). Still, Dorne's lesson material was exceptional for its time even though his "faculty" was mostly unskilled in preparing it and uninvolved in teaching it. They were, however, a virtual who's who of top illustrators of his time.

The Famous Artists:

Norman Rockwell:
With the Post artist leading the roster,
few looked on down the lengthy list at
some of the less-than-stellar names.




Harold von Schmidt:
A macho painter of western
subjects, mostly a men's
magazine illustrator.

Stevan Dohanos:
 Rockwell's strongest rival at the
Post, his style similar but busier.

Fred Ludekens:
Self-taught, western artist,
more of an ad-man than artist.

Ben Stahl:
Won a scholarship at age 12,
his work appearing mostly
inside the Post.

Jon Whitcomb:
A nurse, lighting a cigarette
for a patient? Times have change.

Robert Fawcett:
The best draftsman of the lot,
later published his own series
of "how to" art books.

Al Parker:
Considered the "Dean of Illustrators,"
he may have been the most versatile
of them all.






John Atherton:
 A Post artist, but one who moved 
on to fine art later in his career.

Austin Briggs:
Another Post artist, though certainly
no threat to Rockwell.

Peter Helck:
Specialized in rural scenes and
especially race cars from the
earliest days of racing.












Al Dorne:
by Norman Rockwell





Hopper's Nighthawks

The Nighthawks, 1942, Edward Hopper

It's not often that a work of art is recognized as "great" without the passage of a number of years (sometimes centuries) after its creation and very often long after the artist's death. Vincent van Gogh is a prime example. Henri Rousseau is another. Several of the Impressionists and Post-impressionists also fit that bill. On the other hand painters such as Leonardo, Rubens, Rembrandt, and Rockwell were recognized for the genius of their work well within their lifetimes. In May, 1942, a little-known painter and printmaker from upstate New York sold his most famous work to the Chicago Art Institute for $3000 (a very respectable price for a painting by an artist of limited stature at the time). Edward Hopper had completed his moody The Nighthawks (above) in January of that year, barely four months earlier.

Other than the artist himself, Hopper's wife of 41 years, Jo (Nivison) Hopper, also his in-house art historian, may well be the force most responsible for his rise to fame in the art world and his remaining one of the most respected American artists of all time. Much of what we know of Hopper's professional life we owe to her. From Jo’s notes, we learn that the painting’s title is a playful joke about the strong, beaklike nose of the smoking man. This nickname is itself a glimmer of human tenderness, a light mockery which suddenly brings the whole painting to life. We see Hopper's night hawk, just one of a small group, silent souls in a time of global war, in the large, lonely city, in a diner, and, like many of us, they are, alone/together.

The Art Student

(Miss Josephine Nivison),

Robert Henri

Edward Hopper Self-portrait, 1903

Edward Hopper was often evasive and guarded. He frequently denied stringently the popular readings of his paintings. He did not, he would insist, intentionally im-bue his urban scenes with an unspoken pregnancy of human feeling, an eerie, uncommunicative atmosphere of the mod-ern metropolis, with which they’ve become associated. But when reflecting on his most successful and evocative painting, even Hopper himself had to admit it: “Unconsciously, probably, I was painting the loneliness of a large city.” Nighthawks was completed in January of 1942, just weeks after Pearl Harbor and the United States subsequent joining of the Second World War. One might guess that a downtown diner would be alive with news, debate, and speculation at such a historic time. Hopper instead chooses to observe an oppressive silence, picking out the figures and their features in a way which suggests great, silent distances between them, despite sharing the same bubble of space and time.

The neighborhood....almost deserted.

The architecture of the paint-ing seems designed to com-partmentalize, divide, and separate. It’s all sharp verti-cals and pronounced horizon-tals, frames and doorways, shadows and blockages. The detailed rendering of the em-pty shop across the street (right) is a careful and potent observation of utter absence. The painting’s strange silence is given force by the compo-sition of the four people who occupy it. In her notes on the painting, Hopper’s wife des-cribes them as a good looking blond boy in white behind the counter. There's a girl in red blouse and brown hair (for whom she posed) eating a sandwich. The male "night hawk" (beak) wears a dark suit, steel grey hat, black band, and blue shirt holds cigarette.

The center offers little of interest to the viewer.

Occupying the direct center of the large canvas sits ;a dark, sinister figure, his back turned to us, unwilling or unable to communicate (above). Our eyes catch him first, but receive nothing in re-turn. So we scan and look elsewhere. The activity of the man behind the counter (below) gives us a kind of hope. He’s the most dynamic of the group by far. In the act of straightening up, he shows his face and searches for some response from the man and woman at the counter. He plays the choric role, mirroring our desire for communication. The two stony figures do not reciprocate. He might as well be talking to the two inanimate, coffee dispensing tanks behind him, which they resemble.

The man behind the counter seems to communicate, but doesn't.

The relationship between the man and woman sitting at the counter is perhaps one of the most intriguing, yet mysterious, relationships between any two figures in any painting throughout art history (below). The woman morosely raises some morsel of food to her mouth, seeming mechanical, without appetite. The man allows his cigarette to smoke itself out, his blank eyes shadowed by the peak of his hat. There’s maybe a subtle hope of tenderness, though, if you look closely at the composition of their arms and hands. The man’s right arm and the woman’s left form the exact mirror-angle of one another. Each forearm stretches along a perfect perpendicular. The angle of the woman’s other arm matches the man’s right arm exactly. This is a geometric harmony which cannot be ignored. It is part of the painting’s quiet language.

Are they together or simply together apart?

And though the woman’s hand seems to be placed behind the man’s, on the two-dimensional plane of the canvas, their skin-tones overlap. As far as the application of paint goes, Hopper has essentially allowed their hands to meet. The longer you look, the more the fingers of each hand appear to shiver with tenderness and desire. Perhaps these boundaries can be crossed. After all, by some miracle we. as viewers. have been allowed to see and read these people through the window, and then through the second window, which is the surface of the painting. It's from Jo’s notes that we learn that the painting’s title is a playful joke about the strong, beaklike nose of the smoking man (posed by Hopper himself). This nickname is itself a glimmer of human tenderness, a light mockery which suddenly brings the whole thing to life. Here he is, our night hawk. The group, silent, in a time of global war, in the large, lonely city, in a diner, and, like all of us, here they are, alone/together.

Nighthawks preliminary drawings.

So, where exactly is this diner Hopper made so famous? Well, needless to say, in a city like New York, the actual diner has long ago ceased to exist. In fact it never really existed at all as depicted by Hopper. He used an amalgamation of several similar eateries in the Greenwich neighborhood. Yet Hopper claimed THE Nighthawks diner was based on a real place though he was cagey about naming the actual eatery. His only clue was that the diner was a restaurant on New York’s Greenwich Avenue where two streets meet. Therefore, the actual location of his inspiration has long been a matter of debate. Popular opinion favors Mulry Square, a small triangular lot at Greenwich Avenue and Seventh Avenue. However, historical records show that a gas station occupied the lot in the early 1940s, not a diner. In 2013, New York Magazine set out to track down the real inspiration for Nighthawks, scouring streets and historical photographs to settle the discussion once and for all. They ultimately determined Hopper's picture-perfect diner was, indeed, made up of various elements of Manhattan architecture. These components include a glass-and-steel storefront on 11th Street, the curve of the Flatiron Building, and a long-gone restaurant called Crawford Lunch. Fittingly, a 3D version of Nighthawks was created within a display window of the Flatiron Building in the summer of 2013. In Block 613, Lot 62, (below) on the corner where 7th Avenue South hits Perry Street, the 1950s mapmaker has drawn a rectangle and written the word DINER. Sometime between the late 1930s and the 1950s, a diner appeared on the southwest corner of the Mulry Square triangle. Hopper completed The Nighthawks in 1942.

A map of the Greenwich Avenue area with early guesses marked with X's and the likely actual site (just above) circled in red.

The experts comment:



Nighthawks has inspired countless other artists. By the same token, there may be some influence from Van Gogh's Café At Night. Based on the similar theme and concentration on the play of light at night, Van Gogh's piece may have sparked Hopper's ideas. Interestingly, Café at Night was exhibited in New York in January of 1942, right as Hopper was working on Nighthawks. Though well after Hopper began his painting, it's probable he would have seen Van Gogh’s painting, inasmuch as his own works were also on display at the same venue. Among several other works later inspired by The Nighthawks, likely the most famous is Gottfried Heinwein's version titled Boulevard Of Broken Dreams (below).


Boulevard Of Broken Dreams, Gottfried Heinwein
based on Hopper's The Nighthawks. Can you identify
the tragic 1950s movie celebrities?