Art Galleries

Art galleries today often seem more inclined toward startling the viewer and overwhelming the senses than in selling art, as in Suze Woolf's Fluted Columns on the Colorado.

There is much that has changed about art over the past hundred years. I suppose, without the element of change, we could hardly consider art to, in fact, be art. I consider change to be tantamount to the definition of life itself and certainly an important element in the definition of art. Styles change, media changes, artists change (even within their own lifetimes). Especially in the past hundred years, the very way we think about art has changed. Art has changed from a fairly viable means of promoting social change a hundred years ago into the role of bystander, at most merely reflecting the nature of social change. Artists, especially painters, at least up through the 1960s or later, used to make waves. Today, they do the waving. Film, video, and social media have become the wave of the future. Painting has been relegated to something of a harmless, antique art form best suited for covering cracks in the plaster.

 

Many urban art galleries have two faces, one on the street, the other online.

Nowhere is this century-long change in the world of art more notable than in the venerable institution of the chic, big-city art galleries which populate the urban enclaves where money is no object. Virtually any artist of any standing at all has a web presence today. Some sell from their web sites; most don't. There are virtual galleries with huge "stables" of prolific unknown artists which have no "brick and mortar" address. And even those which do have a storefront presence maintain restrained, highly sophisticated Websites (as above) used to promote their artists, though rarely do they actually sell their work online. In design and appearance, art galleries today reflect two determinant qualities, the nature of the work they sell, and their geographic location.



The chic, stark, polished, minimalist look of a big-city art gallery today.

A trendy gallery in Manhattan's SoHo district might often appear cool, quiet, spacious, and minimalist, "laid back" to an intimidating degree (as above), handling only the most avant-garde works by big-name or up-and-coming artists. One or two sales a month covers their operating expenses and affords a modest profit. One hundred miles away, hugging the boardwalk of Atlantic city, an art gallery would have more the ambience of a main street, small-town gift shop (as below), featuring seascapes, street scenes, animals, still-lifes and expressionistic figural paintings--a virtual catalog of something-for-everyone eclecticism often quite fascinating while paradoxically somewhat boring.

The something-for-every-taste eclectic art gallery is in upper income tourist destinations.

If this geographic dichotomy seems stark, it bares little comparison to the "then and now" of one hundred years ago. Charles William Dowdeswell started out in London sometime in the 1870s, making picture frames and selling the occasional print to fill them. Around 1880, in partnership with his brother, he ventured into the art gallery business, opening a modest establishment at 133 New Bond Street. A few years later, Dowdeswell & Dowdeswell moved up the street to a more prestigious location (160 New Bond Street) where once had been the far more cutting edge (for its time) art gallery, Le Salon Parisien. There they did quite well for themselves until both men died or retired in the years following WW I. They promoted such British artists as James McNeill Whistler, Jan van Beers, Wyke Bayliss, sketches and drawings by Sutton Palmer, as well as prints by Charles Méyron, and Seymour Haden. Today, only the mention of the American expatriate, Whistler "rings a bell." The rest are obscure, at best.

The art gallery of 100 years ago.

The trade journal British Architect reported: "Messrs. Dowdeswell have...provided a fine gallery about 100 feet long, which consists of three compartments, divided off by draped portiéries, and excellently upholstered with drapery, varied between dark blue, green, and sage green and brown.” It sounds like Scarlett O'Hara's front parlor. Paintings were hung frame to frame as well as being propped up on the floor against the wall or in ornately carved chairs. Featured works rated a brass easel. Lighting, if not by skylight (rare) was largely inadequate by today's standards. Heavy upholstery and drapery ruled the day. Frames, though by that time machine carved, were equally heavy and ornate. It was, perhaps, no accident that the Dowdeswell brothers got out of the gallery business shortly after WW I; for by then, such Victorian trappings were starting to fall away. Art and art merchandizing were changing. The "less is more" concept in art, and by association, art galleries, was starting its long rule, which continues today, often in quite extreme forms.

Hardwood floors, an excess of off-white, and minimal furnishings have replaced the heavy carpeting, draperies, and framing, of 1913; yet art galleries today continue to rely upon prints and photographs as a means to sell costly custom framing.



 

 

Egyptian Art

Copyright, Jim Lane

The Pyramids of Giza, mostly just
a good place to get your picture
taken among the buses.

Copyright, Jim Lane

Egyptian Excursion, 2010, Jim Lane,
Acrylic on papyrus. Do you have to be
Egyptian to paint Egyptian art?

With all the turmoil in Egypt so much in the news these days, and having spent a couple days in that country in 2010, it seems fitting to me to delve into the art of the Nile River basin. It is with a great deal of foreboding that I do so. Once you get past King Tut, the pyramids, Nefertiti, and the many statues of Ramses II, Egyptian art becomes mind-boggling complex. For one thing, there's so MUCH of it, stretching back nearly five thousand years. Likewise, a great deal is known about Egyptian art thanks to two factors--the preservative qualities of the desert environment and the early utilization of papyrus in art production. Add to this the fact that much of what we know about Egyptian art is literally engraved in stone, which tends to be a pretty archival substance. The other problems involved in studying Egyptian art is that we have learned to read hieroglyphics and are thus familiar with the very long and convoluted history of that country's culture. For anyone tackling Egypt's contribution to the world art culture, the difficulty seems to come down to TMI--too much information.

 

Memi and Sabu, 2575-2465 BC,
Fourth Dynasty, likely husband and
wife and friends of the pharaoh.

Egyptologists have tried to simplify all this by dividing the history of Egypt into various periods--the Old Kingdom (left), the New Kingdom (below, right), the Third Intermediate Kingdom, Roman Egypt, etc. Does it help? Frankly, not much. Beyond that they speak of ruling dynasties, which are at least numbered, but once more, there are so many of them. I'd have to say that, without a doubt, Egyptian art history constitutes the most difficult area of study in the history of art history (rivaled closely by Greek art). Yet, as much as we might like to ignore such complex studies, we can't just go along pretending it all didn't happen. I can't count the number of times, in dealing with other topics, that I've had to refer back to Egyptian art as having provided an important input into the development of our world art culture.

 

Khonsu's outer and inner coffins,
painted gesso on wood, 1279-1213 BC.
New Kingdom, 19th Dynasty.

There are three basic themes in Egyptian art (1.) Life after death, (2.) Pharaoh Glorification, and (3.) Everyday Life on the Banks of the Nile (what we might term genre art). The earliest of these is the first one, the whole, elongated study of tomb art (right) which stretches for the first 2,500 years pretty much up through the birth of Christ. The vain-glorious monumental statues of pharaoh after pharaoh among Egyptian architectural ruins make up the second. The third area, Egyptian genre art, to me seems the most interesting and most neglected. I'm far more fascinated by how the (to use a recent phrase) lower ninety-eight percent lived than the top two percent.

Osiris here weighs the heart of the deceased (figure on left, nearest the scales) and finds
her worthy to enter the afterlife. Virtually every detail here is known, which makes this
scene from "The Book of the Dead" as interesting as it is exasperatingly complex. This
work is from the Third Intermediate Period, 21st Dynasty.

No discourse on Egyptian art would be complete without mentioning the "Book of the Dead." As seen above, the art is typical of what we think of as the Egyptian formula, faces shown in profile, bodies drawn at an angle. The "Book of the Dead" did not exist in a single scroll but has been compiled from multiple sources such as that above and from tomb walls. It consisted largely of "spells" designed to aid those passing from this world to the next and dates primarily from the intermediate period, the eleventh to the seventh centuries BC. However, it was still in use as late as 50 BC.

Everyday life along the Nile, when appearing in Egyptian tombs, very often dealt with
either hunting or farming, as seen above in these images from the Old Kingdom period roughly 4,500 years ago.

Virtually all of what I termed Egyptian genre painting derives from the walls of the hundreds of tombs recovered during the past few centuries from the sands and preservation of the dry, desert heat. As a result, we know much more regarding Egyptian life, culture, history and artistic development than any other civilization in pre-Christian history. However, Egyptian art and culture did not end when Octavian invaded the country following the defeat of Cleopatra and Marc Anthony at Actium in 30 BC. Egyptian art did, however, become "Romanized," losing much of his formulaic past in favor of Latin realism. In effect, it became "modernized."

The Library of Alexandria, 2002, its main reading room can handle 2000 visitors.

The history of the Egypt during the Christian and Islamic eras is as tormented and complex as it's many periods and dynasties earlier; but, even today, there continues to be a distinctively Egyptian quality to its modern art, as seen in the architecture of its modern-day Library of Alexandria. Designed in the shape of a flattened cylinder tilted toward the sea, the structure is as modern and functional as any to be found. With its massive skylight and eleven different levels, the new Library of Alexandria attempts to replicate in function, if not in form, the storehouse of art, and knowledge of the original, destroyed by fire around 30 BC. Let's hope, with all the violence besetting Egypt today, this one doesn't suffer the same fate.

Copyright, Jim Lane

Interior of the Library of Alexandria is shaped somewhat like a terraced
amphitheater with two museums, gift shops, and more than a million
volumes comprising three major languages in its collection.







 

John Lautner

Arango Marbrisas, 1973, Acapulco, Mexico, John Lautner. Note the "sky moat."

A couple weeks ago, as I was extoling the exquisite beauty of the Bob Hope House in Palm Springs (08-03-13), I made a note to myself to sometime do a piece on Hope's architect, John Lautner. Today, as I was tidying up my desk, I found the note. John Lautner has long been one of my favorite architects. The problem in writing about him is that there are so many gorgeous views, both inside and outside his houses that the choice of which ones to feature in this limited space and within the limited attention span of most readers, that photo selection becomes a gut-wrenching endeavor. In addition to the Hope House, Lautner designed three or four others which easily stand out as among his best. The Arango Marbrisas House (top) is often considered his single greatest masterpiece. Perched on a hilltop overlooking Acapulco Bay, the most remarkable feature is what the architect termed his "sky moat," an infinity pool flowing around the edge of the main terrace which serves the purpose of a railing while avoiding the divisive nature of such an amenity.

 

The Lautner House, 1939, John Lautner. The Wright influence is notable.

John Lautner spent his apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin Fellowship, though he was no fan of Wright's International Style of architecture. What he picked up from Wright was the man's feel for organic architecture, plus some of the eccentric architect's personal idiosyncrasies. Like Wright, Lautner could often be high-handed and difficult to work with. But then, genius can seldom be homogenized. Lautner went to Los Angeles and Southern California (where most of his approximately 200 lifetime projects are located) in 1938 following five years with Wright to start his own practice. At the same time, he continued his association with his mentor, supervising the construction of several Wright projects in the Los Angeles area. His first significant solo house was his own (above), built in 1939 just east of Hollywood in the Silver Lake area. It was featured in House and Garden magazine at the time, bringing him much praise and recognition, tagged as being the ideal house for California living.

Chemosphere, 1960, John Lautner. The house appears precarious from below, but
has withstood all the heavy rains, mudslides, and earthquakes the area is known for.

During the WW II era, Lautner worked with a company doing military construction in southern California. In the years following the war, Lautner broke with Wright and teamed up with architect Douglas Honnold as an associate (Lautner didn't receive his architects license until 1952) on several commercial projects. That partnership ended when Lautner had an affair with Honnold wife. Lautner later divorced his own wife and married Honnold's divorced wife. The two men remained good friends however. During the 1950s, Lautner worked on his own, his reputation for daring, cutting-edge homes growing as the hillside building boom in Los Angeles developed and soon went wild. His houses during this period were seldom large by today's standards, but invariably employed daring engineering and architectural innovations. His big splash (as David Hockney would put it) came in 1960 with his fabled Chemosphere House (above), built for aerospace engineer Leonard Malin on a nearly unbuildable lot in the Hollywood Hills area. It's "flying saucer" shape, poised on a single concrete piling, became an iconic trademark for the budding young architect.

The Wolff House, 1961, West Hollywood, John Lautner

By the early 1960s, Lautner had attained the enviable level of "trendy." During this era came the Marco Wolff House (above) in West Hollywood and the Sheats Goldstein House (below) in Beverly Hills. Unlike his later works, these two houses are quite angular, continuing to reflect the Wright influence though much bolder than the Bauhaus International Style of the previous decades. Lautner was becoming spectacular. His wealthy clients loved him. 1968 marked the construction of Lautner's most "space age" house, the Arthur Elrod House in Palm Springs (just down the street from where the Hope House would later rise up. Featuring what has been called a "sunburst" concrete canopy, its circular shape allowing broad, uninterrupted views of the desert valley below. Lautner's use of natural boulders from the site harkens back to his work with Wright in supervising the construction of Fallingwater.

Sheats-Goldstein House, 1962, Beverly Hills, John Lautner

The 1970s saw Lautner's career reach its pinnacle with the Hope House in Palm Springs and the massive, 25,000 square foot Acapulco mansion built for the Mexican supermarket magnate, Jeronimo Arango (top). Lautner was at his best when faced with difficult building sites. His Chemosphere house could only be reached up the hillside by funicular. Yet these sites always boasted spectacular views and Lautner's creations never failed to exploit these views and harmonize with the environmental assets and liabilities that came with them.
 

The Elrod House, 1968, Palm Springs, John Lautner

The Elrod House from the inside looking out, displaying his "sunburst" canopy.

 For an insightful video dealing with this artist/architect click here: John Lautner Houses



 

Wilhelm Bendz

Model Class at the Copenhagen Academy, 1826, Wilhelm Bendz



Wilhelm Bendz Self-portrait, 1826

In 1825, a Danish artist from Copenhagen attempted to win his country's gold medal in painting. Fresh from his studies at the Danish Royal Academy, the young man was out to make a name for himself. That name was Wilhelm Ferdinand Bendz. He did not win the gold medal. The problem for this technically quite adept, budding young artist was that the Gold Medal in painting, in Copenhagen and elsewhere in Europe, was only awarded to history paintings or on rare occasions works dealing with classical mythology. Bendz painted neither. He tended toward genre scenes (everyday life) and the occasional genre portrait featuring middle and upper-class families involved in scenes from their normal, everyday life.

Artists in the Evening at Finck's Coffee House in Munich, 1832, Wilhelm Bendz

Smoking Party, 1828, Wilhelm Bendz

Genre painting during this time was looked down upon, positioned a step below portraiture and maybe a little above simple landscapes. The young man took the loss well, he decided to concentrate on what he did best and forego critical acclaim. Specialization was the key to success in the Danish art world (though perhaps not quite to the extreme degree as in Holland). Bendz took it upon himself to specialize in genre scenes involving the narrow art world he inhabited, painting scenes from the painting classes he knew so well, and portraits of his fellow artists. That sounds today like an extremely narrow focus, but Bendz was, in fact, fairly successful at it. His Model Class at the Copenhagen Academy (top) is considered one of his best. Thanks to the work of Wilhelm Bendz, we, as artists today, can get something of a feel for what it must have been like to study and work as an artist nearly two hundred years ago.

A Young Artist Looking at a sketch through a Mirror, 1825, Wilhelm Bendz.
Notice the detailed depiction of the mundane artists' tools of the day.

The Raffenberg, 1831, Wilhelm Bendz

Bendz's genre portraits would, of course, today be the stock-in-trade of family photographers, either amateur or professional. Bendz's efforts, such as The Raffenberg Family, (left) from 1831, depicts a young lady being introduced for the first time to her future mother-in-law, and through a small, painted portrait, to her deceased father-in-law. The painting is both a scene from daily life as well as a momentous occasion for the family. His Smoking Party (above, right) from 1828 is an all male genre grouping of tobacco addicts with a musical bent, enjoying their vice. His A Young Artist Looking at a sketch through a Mirror from 1826, features an artist employing one of the oldest tricks known to artist.

The Painter Christian Holm, 1826,
Wilhelm Bendz

Despite not pursuing a career as a history painter, Bendz apparently did well with his narrow specialization in that, in 1831, he won a travel scholarship which enabled him to visit, Dresden, Munich, Berlin, and Venice. Wilhelm Bendz died at the age of 28, thus he did not leave behind a large body of work for us to peruse and analyze in regarding his stature as an artist. Yet his paintings of his art school friends and the academic training they endured provides us a fascinating insight into the early 19th century European art world. His end came as Bendz passed briefly through Venice on his way to Rome. There the young man picked up a "lung infection" from which he died in Vicenza a few days later (too many smoking parties, perhaps). 

Sports Art

OSU Montage, 2006, Jim Lane, my most ambitious sports effort.

Although I'm not at all a sports fan, I do claim the title of sports artist among my many other areas of subjective typecasting as a painter. Both in paintings and drawn portraits, I've done more than my share of baseball and football players, not to mention more than a few of their cheerleaders. Now that I think about it, I've also drawn a number of wrestlers and basketball players. Being from Ohio, I do have a warm place in my heart for the OSU Buckeyes. Even though I graduated from Ohio University, the Bobcats have never interested me much. As a painter, I've strictly limited myself to OSU football. Some might ask, if I have little interest in sports, why I paint sports subject. One word--money. It's no secret there is a TON of money in sports and several hundred pounds of it in painting and drawing sports. If the truth were known, I'd wager most artists paint sports figures primarily for the same reason I do.

Joe Montana, Steven Holland

Undoubtedly, the big money for an artist is in football art, followed some distance back by baseball and basketball. Other sports and their art bring up the rear, so to speak. The first name coming to mind in sports art is that of Leroy Neiman, to the point I'm not going to post any of his paintings here simply because you've probably already seen them, or at least, have a stereotypical image of his work. Instead, I've picked at random from the thousands of sports artist with work on line, two or three which appeal to me. The work of Steven Holland (above) jumped out at me. His Joe Montana action painting has a rich, dark, "gritty" look to it which I think captures the game perfectly. So many other artists, myself included, tend to want to paint "pretty" pictures of sports. Football can be, and often is, downright "un-pretty."

Mark Trubisky seems equally at home painting any sport.

Cut from the Leroy Neiman mold is Mark Trubisky (above). Though Mark has both a bachelor's degree from Syracuse University, and a master's degree from Penn State, neither of them are art related. He is totally self-taught as an artist, yet he has developed a quite distinctive, painterly looseness of style setting him apart from others in this crowded field. Sports artist Andy Jurinko, who died in 2011 at the age of 71, was quite the opposite, painting near photographic images closely resembling portraits, though his figures never lack for the action so important in sports art. He painted mostly baseball legends and the ballparks where they became legendary (below).

Stan Musial , by Andy Jurinko

I didn't write today's item simply to exhibit my own sports art, but while I'm at it, there is one piece I'm quite proud of. It's no secret that, by necessity, sports artists work almost exclusively from photographs. I very often used poses of players from a totally different teams, then changed the uniform colors and design, adding heads and faces from yet other photos to create my OSU football figures. The painting below, Big Ten in Action, uses three images of the same player to try to capture the rapid movement of the throwing action and, indeed, the whole game of football. Any sports photographer will tell you the game of football is the most difficult to follow on the ground in trying to shoot the action.

 



Big Ten in Action, 2006, Jim Lane

Similarly, where action is concerned, it takes a major effort to capture on film (or digitally) the movement of a single figure. When two or more are involved in the action, the difficulty nearly doubles. The painting below, titled simply X, like the one above, involved quite a lot of digital photo manipulation long before any attempt was made to move to canvas.



X, 2006, Jim Lane. This and all my other sports paintings were done using a palette knife in an attempt to capture the raw, brute force of the game. 

I would be remiss if I didn't include the guys (and at least mention the gals) who make sports economically viable and its sports art, buyable. Often they're derogatorily called "couch potatoes." Individually, they pay very little to enjoy all the dangerous, rough and tumble action of their favorite sport. However they support that sport by their simple physical presence on the living room couch. I was prepared to elevate myself to this vital calling, but in all honesty, I almost never watch sports of any kind.

After the Game, 2007, David J. Negron--the most important figure in sports.

 

Wood Sculpture

Ancient Egyptian carved wooden figures. If they did this to celebrate the birth of a calf,
I wonder what they did when a baby was born. These may have been toys.

Grinling Gibbons, 17th century

If you mention or think about sculpture, the first material to come to mind is stone, probably marble. The first artist to come to mind is Michelangelo. However, if we're to believe the Bible, the first carved images mentioned are of wood. Although wood was not all that plentiful in the biblical middle-east, it was a good deal easier to shape into recognizable images of worship than stone, and had the added advantage of being more portable. Even cast gold, silver and other metals seem to predate carved stone. And even at that, most early stone carving was what we term "low or bass relief" solely for the purpose of storytelling wall decoration. Free-standing stone figures were a relatively late addition to the sculptor's repertoire. Aside from reclining sphinxes, even the Egyptian figures of Ramses II were usually fastened to the wall behind them. However, we find a long tradition of in-the-round wood carving in Egyptian art (top) dating back to the earliest dynasties, four to five thousand years ago (2980-2475 BC). More recently, wood carving is mentioned by Moses in Chapter 35 of Exodus. The Chinese have a similarly long tradition of carving items from wood.

 

Adam and Eve, 1491-94
Tilman Riemenschneider

Yet we glorify that which is carved from stone and largely ignore, even great masterpieces carved of wood. Perhaps the greatest artist employing wood as his sculptural medium of choice was the German sculptor, Tilman Riemenschneider (06-16-12), (1460-1531). His life-size Adam and Eve (left) is typical, though less complex than some of his pieces. Moreover wood carving had a long and illustrious tradition long before that among the Greeks. Some Bible historians postulate that Jesus of Nazareth's skill as a carpenter might be better translated as a wood carver. In England during the 17th century, the greatest wood-carving artist would have been Grinling Gibbons (above, right), who worked with the great architect, Sir Christopher Wren. He specialized in floral designs and throne decorating. In France and Italy from the Renaissance on, most wood carving centered on crucifixes, which had to be light enough to hang from church walls. Even the great Michelangelo (below) started out carving such wooden decorations.

 

Christ Refound, late 15th century, Michelangelo



Colonial American woodcarving,
Powell House, Philadelphia

In colonial America, the major emphasis seems to have been on ships' figureheads and interior architectural decorations around windows, doors, and fireplaces (right). Today, and for the past hundred years or so, woodcarving had relied on power tools, everything from chain saws to Dremel tools, while the selection, preparation, and preservation of the materials employed in such works has been the a major focus of modern art objects made of wood. Today stone carving is approaching the realm of a "lost art" more often incorporating sand-blasting than hammer and chisels. However, the tools of the woodcarver have hardly changed in more than a thousand years. That's not to say that wood carving has been unaffected by modern technology. Most noticeable has been the computer driven CO2 laser (below, right) which costs about $8,000. It can work from any digital source to carve or "etch" images into wood varying in size from that of a silver dollar (below, left) to 24 inches by 36 inches. Items include everything from family photos to intricate, highly decorative keepsake boxes. Yet, we insist upon calling even this, wood "carving" rather than wood sculpture.

Computer-driven CO2 laser

Woodcarving using a computer driven laser.

 

 

Ludwig Bemelmans

Ludwig Bemelmans, 1945

The world has often been gifted with gifted writers. The same is true of gifted artists. But not so often, except on the newsprint pages of the "funny papers" do these two gifts come together. Charles Schulz was one such example, but there are dozens more. Some we might suggest were better artists than writers, but most weren't. For most (Schulz being an exception), the writing came first, the drawing was an adjunct skill developed as a means of deeper expression beyond inadequate words. That was the case with the Austrian-Hungarian writer-artist Ludwig Bemelmans. He wanted to be an artist, but was never very good at it. The writing was a skill developed in mid-life. Actually, better than half his life he spent working in hotels, as a waiter and various other positions in what we now call the "hospitality industry."

 

The original book with
Bemelmans' original art.

Ludwig Bemelmans was born in 1898. His parents owned a hotel in what is now northern Italy, however his first language was French, his second German. When Ludwig was six years old, his father ran off with his governess. His mother was forced to take her family back to her native Regensburg, Germany, where her young son did not take well to German schooling and the accompanying German discipline. As a young teen, Ludwig was apprenticed to his uncle at a hotel in Austria. A shooting incident with a waiter at the hotel left him with the choice of reform school or emigration to the U.S. He chose the latter and spent the next few years working at the only trade he knew, restaurants and hotels. When the war came, he enlisted, but because of his German background was not sent overseas. He was, however, promoted to Second Lieutenant and after the war, became an American citizen. It was out of this experience he later wrote his first book, My War with the United States.

 

Bemelmans' Madeline in Front
of Notre Dame.

After the war, Bemelmans took up painting. Except for a few art classes as a child, Bemelmans was self-taught; he was far from successful. He tried his hand at cartooning but was dropped by his syndication after only six months. In 1934, he managed to get published his first children's book titled Hansi. Then there followed five more books of various types in partnership with Viking Press. This could be counted as a modest success in the hard times of the 1930s. Then came Madeline (pronounced MAD-a-line), quite literally, in that she was modeled after his daughter, Barbara, born in 1936, but named after his wife, Madeleine.

Bemelmans' and Madeline's
Friends. Miss Clavel, at 
top, is their governess

"In an old house in Paris, that was covered with vines, lived twelve little girls in two straight lines... the smallest one was Madeline." So began his first of what grew into a series of six children's books published regularly until 1962. Each started with the same familiar line. The first Madeline book, which later won a Caldecott Award, had been rejected by his old partner, Viking. Recognizing talent when they saw it, Simon and Shuster became his new publisher. They allowed him to also illustrate his story largely as an effort to save the cost of an illustrator. This cost-saving ploy likely saved Madeline as well, in that Bemelmans' illustrations are as charming as the stories of his little girl in blue with the enormous straw hat.

 



John Bemelmans Marciano--
Like grandfather, like grandson.

Bemelmans published six Madeline books along with a seventh following his death. Ironically, his grandson, who seems to be a carbon copy of his illustrious illustrating grandfather, may soon eclipse his matriarchal ancestor, having so far published four additional Madeline books, the latest involving a trip of the twelve little girls in two straight lines to the White House. The Madeline series was not Bemelmans' only publishing effort. In all, he authored, published, and often illustrated over fifty titles, as well as articles and covers for magazines such as The New Yorker, Holiday, and Town and Country, and numerous others. His days in the restaurant business also made him something of a gourmet, and many of his non-children's books deal with food and travel. The Madeline books, however, made him famous and, no doubt, allowed him to indulge in other literary genres. From the 1950s through the 1990s, Madeline has sold over 5.5-million books and found her way to television and live-action movies. Late in life, Ludwig Bemelmans' publishing success allowed him to fully realize his desire to become a serious painter. He now has works displayed at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and its counterpart, Musee' National d'Art in Paris. He died in October, 1962.



Even some fifty years after her creator's
death, Madeline still managed to get around.