Olympic Art

Greek Wrestlers in the Ancient Olympic Games, Tom Lovell

The year was 1932; the painting
was At the Seaside of Arild by
the Swedish artist David Wallin.

Today we think of the Olympic Games now taking place in Rio de Janeiro as being entirely about athletics. Over the years since 1896, various competitions have been added and subtracted but the games, have remained essentially amateur athletic competitions. However, it might surprise some to realize that from 1912 until 1948, the Olympics involved competition in the fine arts as well--architecture, painting, sculpture, music, and literature. Originally little more than a sideshow, but by 1924 some 193 artists entered the competition. Like the athletic competition, gold, silver, and bronze medals were awarded. In 1928, over 1,100 works were exhibited. However, as time went on, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) began to realize that, at least insofar as the fine arts were concerned, most of the competitors were anything but amateurs. Thus, after the 1948 Olympics in London, the fine arts once more, became a sideshow--an art exhibition running concurrently with the games. Yet, whether a competition or an exhibition, the Olympic games have continued to inspire a multitude of mostly painters and graphic designers in the years since.

 

The Knockdown, 1932, Mahonri Young,
the gold medal winner in sculpture.

Without a doubt the most visible work of Olympic art is that of the Olympic Rings logo (below), designed in 1912 by the founder of the modern Olympic Games, the Frenchman, Pierre de Coubertin, to include the six colors (five rings plus the white background) found in the flags of all participating countries. He won no gold medal for his design. Since he was the founder, he was probably ruled ineligible.

 

The Olympic Rings, 1912, Pierre de Coubertin

It's unknown whether the Greeks, when the began the ancient Olympic Games in 776 BC, included an art competition; but we do know they included foot races, wrestling, horse and chariot racing, and something called, "pankration," which could best be thought of as plain, old-fashioned fighting--hand to hand combat with virtually no rules. The athletes used boxing and wrestling but also kicking and holds, locks and chokes on the ground. The only things not allowed were biting and gouging out the opponent's eyes. Oh, and they did all this stark naked as well. Sounds like WWF on Saturday nights (except for the naked part, thank God). Alas, the Greeks left behind no images of the sport such as seen in their ceramic pottery foot race (below).

 

In some ways, the games have changed very little...except
that back then, Nike was only a Greek goddess.

Olympic posters have come
a long way since 1896.
Compare this one to those
below.

Although there is no longer an art competition, Olympic art continues to thrive, basically in three categories--posters, mascots, and arch-itecture. They are all three very much inter-twined. The sale of Olympic posters and stuf-fed toy mascots helps pay for the Olympic architecture. Inasmuch as the first modern Olympic games were held in Athens, Greece, starting in 1896, the poster for the event prominently emphasized classical Greek arch-itecture and the Greek origin of the games in 776 BC. The Olympics returned to Athens 108 years later in 2004. The example (left) and those below also illustrate a visual history of graphic design styles over that past 120 years.

Olympic posters tend to reflect the art and culture of the host nation.

Waldi the Daschund, the first official
Olympic mascot. He never made it as
far as to become a costume at the
1972 Munich games.

Without doubt, the most fascinating, not to mention amusing, aspect of Olympic art is that of the Olympic mascots. Although there had been a few unofficial Olympic mascots down through the years, the first official critter was Waldi the dachshund in 1972 at the Munich Olympic Games. The real art. insofar as Olympic mascots are con-cerned, is not in dreaming up and sketching out some cute, cuddly little animal (usually) but in converting such images to costumes that real, live, people can wear in the heat of the summer without suffering hyperthermia. Some have come to include battery operated ventilation devices.

Some are cute, some highly creative, others quite popular with the crowds. Most, however are, quite literally, dumb.

Olympic architecture has its beginnings usually about eight years before the games for which it becomes such an integral part. Almost as soon as the IOC announces its choice for a host city the best architectural minds are at work dreaming up stadiums, guest relations, athlete housing, transportation, and security facilities integrated into what's come to be called the Olympic Village. (Olympic city would be more like it.) One such architect, Jan Wils, even won an Olympic gold medal for his stadium design for the Amsterdam games in 1928. Still today, the 64,000-seat stadium stands as one of the finest ever built for the games. By the way, the first modern-day Olympic stadium is also still in use in Athens. And atop Mount Olympus, the footprint of the first Olympic stadium with his sloped, grassy seating area, can still be discerned.

Rio de Janeiro's Olympic Village is situated on a triangular
peninsula jutting into the city's massive harbor.

French street artist JR designed and engineered the two giant athletes, which are part of the artist’s ongoing ‘inside out’ project.
They are made out of scaffolding and are currently on
display in Rio de Janeiro.

And what would the Olympics be without the
art of LeRoy Neiman? We're about to find out.
He died in June, 2012, shortly before the start
of the London Olympics.

Mount Olympus in sand

 

Coloring Books

Today, many adults have rediscovered the childhood
joy of coloring books.

There as was a time not so many years ago when art instructors, myself included, considered children's coloring books to be an anathema to everything we stood for, everything we wanted to instill in our young students, and every aspect of the creative process. We looked upon them as stifling creativity by inhibiting the child's natural urge to develop eye-hand coordination and render from their imaginations that which made childhood such a marvelous period in their youthful mental development. There is still a good argument to be made as to each of those points. However today, those dealing with children in the fine arts are not quite so vehement in their objection to pre-composed, pre-drawn, pre-printed line drawings where the primary aim, at least on the part of students and their parents, is to "stay inside the lines." Art educators are starting to come around to the fact that being neat and staying within the lines are important, if not overriding skills.

 

Coloring books and Olympic figure skating star, Sonia Henie,
changed quite a bit in just a couple decades.

I can still recall to this day the first moment I became intrigued with art. My Aunt Margaret (who had had some training as an artist) was supervising my use of crayons and a coloring book. I must have been about five years old at the time. The picture was a house with trees in the background and a chimney on top. She took a crayon and demonstrated by coloring one side of the chimney a dark brown and the other side a lighter brown. The result was a three-dimensionality that astounded my pre-school mind. It looked "real." She then proceeded to draw and color some branches within the confines of the tree foliage and then, using various shades of green, blue, yellow, and black, she create a visual texture emulating leaves. WOW! A door had been thrown wide open. I learned to "paint" through the use of crayons and a disreputable coloring book. This would have been about 1950. The visual history of coloring books from about 1887 up through the present gives some idea as how they developed, as well as some of the best and worst up through the years.

 

Coloring books have long reflected children's entertainment and
current evens and the popular culture of their time.

One of the chief objections among art educators to coloring books is not the pre-drawn images, but the crayons. Crayons are a poor substitute when it comes to learning to paint and, within that process, learning about color. Crayons come in a virtual multitude of colors (usually sixty-four to as many as a hundred or more). In other words, this nearly infinite selection short circuits the act of mixing colors and the learning of color theory. Certainly, even waxy crayons can, to some extent (and with no small amount of skill), be layered. But few children do so. In the years I taught, I always preferred students use colored pencils, the higher grade the better. By purchasing them through their art fees, I was able to control the selection of colors available, thus encouraging the layering (mixing) of dry pigments in much the same way as a watercolorist uses washes. And of course, still better, was the use of paints at as early an age as practicable. Here, most coloring books fall short. Their paper is simply not intended to stand up to water based (and certainly not oil based) paints.

 

Lower image, Copyright, Jim Lane

Except for the very young colored pencils should replace crayons as the preferred color medium in the art classroom.
 

Now, having said all of that, we come face to face with the fact that coloring books are seen as inhibiting creativity and the development of drawing skills. BOTH are myths. Creativity is not a fragile item within children or adults of any age. It can, to some extent, be cultivated, but for the most part, it's either present or it's not, and certainly the presence of something as inconsequential as a coloring book is not going to have much impact on this God-given gift. As for drawing skills, such objections presuppose that drawing skill is something every student should develop. It's good that every artist have at least a modicum of familiarity with drawing both from two and three-dimensional sources, but the fact is, that with the ease and ready availability of various projection devices, digital cameras and the like, fewer and fewer artists find the need to employ such time consuming and inaccurate skills.

 

There seems to be a coloring book associated with
virtually every subject in the world today.

Although there are many ideas floating around as to why adults have taken to coloring books with their crayons or (mostly) colored pencils during the past few years, I for one, cannot account for it. I can only repeat the theories proposed by others such as people having (way) too much time on their hands; a search for quiet, peaceful solitude; a need to express themselves creatively without having to endure the steep learning curve demanded by developing drawing skills; or perhaps a renewed interest in color itself and the modest skills needed in dealing with dry pigments (as opposed to far more cantankerous paints). I don't know. All I do know is that whatever your interest there is a coloring book (often several) into which you can apply your skills. If you like, you don't even have to stay inside the lines.

 

Some of the coloring books available online today are...shall
we say, pretty weird. Some encourage you to draw in certain
details yourself or to drink and draw.

Incidentally, for those with a little more of a creative urge than others, there's a couple little tricks I picked up in researching this item. First you can "paint" with colored pencils using a "Q-tip" and a little baby oil. Check out the pictorial demonstration below. Don't substitute a paint brush for the Q-tip and high grade colored pencils work best (Prismacolor, for instance).

 

(1.) Apply a color base in the normal manner. (2.) Use a drop of baby oil on a Q-tip, to gently brush outwards, blending and enhancing the colors. Use the same angle as your pencil stroke. (3.) Allow the area to dry for a few minutes before proceeding. Too much oil and it will "bleed" into the paper leaving a dark halo around your image.

And for those with access to photo editing software and a few minutes to experiment, you can easily create your own coloring book type images to lay around with. Start by selecting a clear photo, loading it onto your screen. Then convert it to 8-bit grayscale (usually under the "edit" function). You'll get a sharp, black and white image. Once satisfied with that, find the software tool or function allowing you to enhance the image. Click on "lighten" (or "brighten") in conjunction with the feature allowing you to increase the contrast of the image. Any gray areas should disappear leaving a simple line drawing (dark areas will simply turn black). This takes a little trial and error. This requires just the right combination. Too much contrast or too much brightening of the image will cause important outlines to disappear. Then you simply enlarge the image to the size desired and print it out. The image of Hilary Clinton (below) was based upon her official First Lady portrait in the White House. Might I suggest a Democratic blue background? Have fun, but please, no moustaches. You should be above that. The picture of Nixon at the bottom, you're welcome to add a few facial follicles. He was well-known for his five-o'clock shadow. It would probably improve his looks.

 

See if you can match the flesh tones in the photo.

 

George Ault

 George Ault--Precisionist, Cubist, Surrealist, realist.

Being an artist doesn't immunize anyone from the standard trials, tribulations, and ongoing pitfalls of life. For some, it tends to sand off the rough edges of life's woes, while for others, it seems to sharpen them, sometimes serving to virtually shred the creative individual's ability to cope with misfortune, whether natural or of the artist's own making. Divorce, destitution, drug abuse, handicaps, physical and mental illnesses, and death, just to name a few, while disturbing to our normal way of life, can be brutally devastating to the sensitive artist as it flows through their psyche and into their art. Some use their art to try to cope. Others find the creative process leaving only open sores. One such artist was the American Realist painter from the early 20th-century, George Ault.

 

George Ault left no self-portraits and precious few photos of himself.

George Copeland Ault was born into a well-to-do family in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1891. When George was eight, his father moved the family of seven to London, where his printing ink company introduced American prinking ink to Europe. George's father, Charles, was, himself, an amateur painter who sometimes exhibited at the Salon of Paris. He had a number of important artistic contacts, in several major U.S. cities where he supported their art museums. Charles Ault cultivated his son’s childhood interest in art, taking him on trips to London and Paris to see works of the Old Masters. As a child, George Ault was often ill with rheumatic fever, which preventing him from attending school until he was eight. In London, as a teenager, Ault attended the University College School, the Slade School of the University of London, and St. John’s Wood School of Art. St. John’s Wood was the site of his first exhibition in 1908. Ault's art education in London was based on British Impressionism. He was taught a reliance on memory over the aid of photographs or sketches. His education was, for the most part, conservative and quite apart from the avant-garde European movements from which he later took inspiration.

 

From Brooklyn Heights,
1925, George Ault

Ault's family moved back to the U.S. in 1911, settling in the New York City suburb of Hillside, New Jersey. Three years later, Ault married Beatrice Hoffman. They set up a home and studio in Hillside. With the influence of his conservative, British training, Ault began experimenting with various representations of landscapes and architecture. He quickly developed an interested in the urban environment, as his works began to suggest a slicker, heightened style of realism, combined with a cubist’s interest in geometry. During the 1920s Ault participated in several exhibitions of the Society of Independent Artists, and later at the Whitney Studio Club. Gradually, Ault became estranged from his wife and moved to New York City with the financial aid of his father, who nonetheless disapproved of Ault’s unemployment and modernist painting tend-encies. Ault had several solo exhibitions at gal-leries in New York, Newark, Los Angeles, and Whitney Museums.

 

January Full Moon, 1941, George Ault

Ault worked in oil, watercolors, and pencil. He has often been grouped with Precisionist painters such as Charles Sheeler and Ralston Crawford because of his unadorned representations of architecture and urban landscapes. However, the ideology and modernism of Precisionism are not overtly apparent in his work. He considered the industrialized American city "the Inferno without the fire," and once referred to skyscrapers as the "tombstones of capitalism." Ault painted what he saw around him, simplifying detail somewhat into flat shapes and planes, to reveal the underlying geometric patterns of his structures. Ault was an analytical painter as well as a realist, noted for his realistic portrayal of the light of darkness. He very often painted nighttime scenes. His later paintings, include works such as January, Full Moon (above) from 1941, and Bright Light at Russell's Corners (below-bottom), probably his most famous piece.

 

Ault's work is sometimes compared to that of
Edward Hopper and Rockwell Kent.

Even as Ault gathered critical acclaim, he found himself in physical and mental decline. Before he was thirty years old, Ault suffered the death of his physically and psychologically troubled mother, lost his brother Donald, whose wife died with him in a suicide pact, and developed reclusive tendencies as he became dependent on alcohol. He soon alienated important people in his life such as the prominent dealer, Edith Halpert. He sought a divorce in 1935 after becoming involved with Louise Jonas, an aspiring writer from Iowa. During these years also, Ault lost his father to cancer and when the family fortune vanished during the Great Depression, his two remaining brothers committed suicide. His only sister, Esther, provided him with financial support which allowed Ault to spend summers in the artistic community of Woodstock N.Y. There Ault produced a total of sixty-seven paintings for the Treasury Relief Art Project and the Works Progress Administration. Ault and Louise made a permanent move to Woodstock in 1937 though the two lived apart from the artistic community, in a rundown house a mile from town. They continued to endure financial hardships. George often traded artwork for services, giving two oil paintings to a dentist who provided care for Louise. Ault began to find more success amid the post-war boom, coupled with continued attempts to improve his sobriety. Some of his best works date from this period.

Studio Interiors, Woodstock, 1940s, George Ault.

However, on December 30, 1948, Ault was discovered dead five days after having drowned in Sawkill Brook while taking a walk alone during dark, stormy weather. The death was ruled a suicide by the coroner, though Louise Jonas contested the decision, claiming Ault had suffered a fall due to a section of missing guard rail and poor health. Given his family history, I would tend to believe the coroner's report.



Corn from Iowa, 1940, George Ault,
one of his few still-lifes.

Nude and Torso, 1945,
George Ault, one of his
still more rare nudes.

Art that Critics Love to Hate

An exhibition opening--can you spot the art critics in the crowd?

Say what you will about art critics, for the professional artist, it's very much a love/hate relationship. That is, artists can't get along with them but likewise can't get far without them. When they praise our work, we love them. When they criticize, we don't. It might surprise some artists to realize that much the same feelings persist on the other side of the keyboard. Without artists there would no need for critics. Yet there is so much art ranging from mediocre to bad in galleries and museums today, there is much for them to hate. The bad art is easy. If it's bad; they say so, often in no uncertain terms. The same goes without saying as to good art; if it's good, they say so, sometimes lavishly. It might also surprise artists that critics do not like to pan an artist and his work. Critics are naturally prone to support and promote the arts. Most art critics, especially local ones, are usually quite kind to the artists they review. It's the vast majority of art in the middle that causes art critics to lose sleep. It's here they're torn between the "good, the bad, and the ugly," simply because this middle ground is a vast witch's brew of all three. Here they must earn their pay, separating which is which, and doing so in a manner suggesting some degree of wisdom combined with an entertaining manner of doing so that won't send the reader flipping to the sports page (or ESPN).

 

Despite the conservative content of his work, Kinkade took a
very Postmodern approach to all other aspects of is career.

There are two factors involved--the art and the art critics. The art of Thomas Kinkade is easy for critics to hate. It's syrupy sweet and sentimental, portraying a pretty, unrealistic national landscape bespeaking the conservative, WASP view of life, liberty, and American patriotism. It's unabashedly aimed at the most lucrative elements in the art world. Until the artist's death in 2012 at the age of fifty-four, Kinkade astoundingly successful at "cashing in." In many ways, he replaced Norman Rockwell as art critics' favorite punching bag. If for nothing else, we can thank him for that. Art journalism has always reflected a liberal, bias, and reflexively gone after any artist not in line with avant-garde thinking. Insofar as art critics were concerned, Kinkade had two strikes against him--his work, and his very Postmodern approach to marketing his work so successfully. Critics tend to hate Postmodernism with almost the same vehemence as sentimentality.

 

One critic summed it up this way:

"Kinkade's bucolic landscapes represent the cotton candy, the Harlequin Romance, of the art world and, if we're honest, terrify the average art critic to tears. Why? Because Kinkade sold more art than almost anyone. People love the stuff. These hugely popular artists represent the chasm between what art critics do and what most people seem to want."

Neiman took a shortcut to fame in the 1950s when his
paintings began to appearin Playboy magazine.
Art critics never forgave him for that.

Highly successful artists pose a threat to the basic livelihood of art critics. Such artist have succeeded despite the best efforts of critics to "keep them in their place." LeRoy Neiman is a good example. Neiman also died in 2012 at the age of ninety-one. His obituary noted that he was one of the most popular artists in the United States. But it also noted that art critics did not hold him in very high regard. The writer went on to add that Neiman's popularity rivaled American favorites like Norman Rockwell, Grandma Moses and Andrew Wyeth, but he never managed to win any critical acclaim during his long life. It would seem to me that simply being lumped in with such iconic greats might be deemed a good deal of "critical acclaim."

 

When an artist can buy and sell his critics several times
over, he tends not to take them too seriously.

Art critics need to be needed. They must have the respect of the art world and their readers or they have nothing. They need to be feared--in a position of power, able to "make or break" an artist's career. When an artist such as Kinkade or Neiman attain great success in selling their work without their approval, art critics feel threatened. And when they do, they bite back, with scathing reviews, hating both the art and the artists, but especially the artists. Although Neiman generated hundreds of works, including paintings, drawings, watercolors, limited edition serigraph prints and coffee-table books which earned him tens of millions of dollars,” the critics were not impressed. He exhibited constantly and his work was included in the collections of dozens of museums around the world yet critical respect eluded him. Mainstream art critics ignored his work completely or dismissed it with contempt as garish and superficial magazine illustrations with high art pretensions. Mr. Neiman claimed not to care.

 

Jack Vittriano--criticizing the critics.

If Neiman cared little as to what the critics said about him, the Scottish painter, Jack Vittriano, not only cares, but fights back. Vittriano is, in many ways much like Thomas Kinkade, though their works are diametrically opposite in terms of content. Kinkade painted American Christian sentimentality. Vittriano's work has been labelled as 'dim erotica'. Yet it sells for hundreds of thousands of pounds. Moreover, Vittriano has taken to criticizing the art critics and the art establishment in general for snubbing his work. Critics of the Scottish artist have branded his work as "brainless." Vittriano often paints women in stockings, heels and suspenders. He confesses, "There are days when I think, 'What is it the critics don't like about me?'." In answer to his own question, Vittriano claims, "To be honest...I just don't think they see sex as a serious subject. If I was painting drug abuse or inner-city violence they'd consider that to be art. They think what I paint is just titillation. It's not titillation; it's what couples do on a Saturday night."

 

Critics very often love his work but hate the artist.

The public loves Koons. His work is the very essence of Postmodern art. It is fun, bright, shiny, accessible, sexy; and the skills he employs (he literally employs hundreds of other artists and craftspeople to produce his works) is miraculous in its exactness. In 2013, Koons’ Balloon Dog sold for an astounding $58.4 million - the most ever paid for a single work by a living artist. That upsets art critics. There’s something about Koons popularity and the huge sums of money which his art sells for that seems to stir up within their hard hearts feelings of jealousy and anger which seep into their attitudes and reviews.

 

Jerry Saltz called the Koons' art:

"...huge, shiny baubles for billionaires...the readymade crossed with greed, money, creepy beauty and the ugliness of our culture. Haters will hate [it], but a retrospective will allow anyone with an open mind to grasp why Koons is such a complicated, bizarre, thrilling, alien, annoying artist."

Roberta Smith wrote:

"[His works] unavoidably reek of Gilded Age excess, art star hubris and the ever-widening inequality gap that threatens this country...a stunning allée of bizarre Pharaonic splendor. Play-Doh is a new, almost certain masterpiece. There are surprises around every corner. Despite some ups and downs."

Seldom do critics struggled so much with their ambivalence as in discussing Koons. He might be making "huge, shiny baubles for billionaires," or his work may "reek of Gilded Age excess," but that's far from any reasonable charges that he is cynically making art only for the money. Koons is a fanatical perfectionist. He pushes the technology and quality, sometimes spending more on his sculptures than he gets for them. Several times he has flirted with bankruptcy. That's not someone in it just for the money. I might also add, if popularity, financial success and/or being an ass were to exclude artists from the history books, we would be bereft of many of the greatest – Caravaggio, Wagner, Pound, and Picasso, to name a few.
 

Painting the Queen

The most recent official portrait of Queen Elizabeth II of England,
painted by Australian-born artist Ralph Heimans.

Not too long ago I completed a series on portraits of U.S. Presidents. As might be expected, Washington, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Kennedy each had dozens, perhaps up into the hundreds of portraits painted of them both during and after their lifetimes. Some of those in the 20th-century had thousands more of photos taken of them. Be that as it may, not one could match in quantity (if not quality), the sheer number of painted and photographic images created of them by artists of all media as compared to the most painted and photographed world figure today, Britain's Queen Elizabeth II. There are very likely dozens of painted portraits of Her Royal Highness from the time she was a little princess of seven in 1933 to this year, 2016, as she turned ninety. Ascending to the throne of England upon the death of her father, George VI in 1952, she is the longest reigning monarch in the history of England. That's sixty-four years--a lot of time to pose for painters.

 

I chose both formal and informal poses in which the various
artists were able to "capture" the queen while maintaining her
royal bearing.

England's National Portrait Galley places the number of portraits painted of the queen at 918, though they don't define how "official" those portraits may be, only that she is the most painted individual in history of the world. I can believe that. I just finished plowing through literally hundreds of painted portraits of the queen, making quite difficult decisions based on a number of criteria as to which ones to collect and which to skip over. I sought to choose some of the best (in my opinion). Above are some of my favorites. I also chose some of the more interesting and unusual; and of course, some of the worst (though usually well-intentioned) portraits of Her Majesty.

 

From a sweetly beautiful little princess to a regal, dowager, monarch--
sixty years in just eight paintings.

One of the many burdens this queen must bear is that there have been so many portraits painted of her over the years that she can simply walk the hallowed halls of Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, and especially London's National Portrait Gallery, and in each place, literally watch herself grow old. In an effort to ease that burden, I've collected eight portraits spread over sixty years and grouped them (above) for her benefit. I'm only seventy but I know what a strenuous trek it is to visit large art museums.

 

What do you think? Assuming she had a good lawyer, could
the queen win a case on the grounds of visual slander?

Another disadvantage in being the most painted person in the world is that a disturbingly large number of those portraits are not very flattering (above). Many of them, you might say, but the UGH in ugly. I don't think the queen would want Lucien Freud's portrait of her hanging around frightening small children. The same would likely apply to the nude portrait she probably did not pose for or commission. It's not that it's really unflattering, mostly is just...somewhat naked. However as nude paintings go, it seems tastefully restrained.

Not the stuff to make an artist a household word, but sufficient
to get you invited back to the palace to see the next unveiling.

For a rising young artist, being asked by the queen to paint her portrait (or some major organization wishing to display her painted image on their wall) the hours spent conversing with, observing, and getting to know such a warm, much-beloved individual is often more important that any fee earned. And when the portrait is finally unveiled and accepted, the results can make, and sometimes, unfortunately, break an artist career and reputation. Usually the palace is warm and gentle in dealing with the working artists trying to paint the queen, but, more than a few times that has not always been the case. Given the odds, the vast majority of portraits of the queen are not godawful bad. On the other hand, neither are they the stuff well-endowed museums and wealthy art collectors fight over at Sotheby's or Christie's (above). In layman's terms, they're good, but they're seldom great.

 

I wonder if the queen ever posed for Andy Warhol in 1985.

Royal Visit, 1953, Jack Wood

Frank Auerbach

Artists who broke the rules

There's an old saying that "rules are made to be broken." Nowhere is this more true than in the realm of art. Artists have been making and breaking rules ever since the first cave painter decreed that smooth, flat rocks made a better painting surfaces than those that were rough and irregular. Then, in all likelihood, a leopard skin-clad art rebel from the next generation, deliberately painted on a rough surface simply to prove it could be done and that his instructor was full of bark and berries. Of course, the key element in the tradition of making and breaking rules is in knowing and understanding the rules in the first place, and then knowing when and how to best break or ignore them so as to serve whatever purpose is intended. Therefore, if rules are made to be broken, they are also taught for the same reason. Naturally though, in teaching rules, more often than not those learning them come to realize that there are valid reasons behind most such rules, and in doing so, come to accept them unthinkingly as a part of their style, technique, and aesthetic values. Then, in knowing such rules, when an artist deliberately rejects one or two, his work is hailed as an artistic breakthrough of monumental importance...or a colossal failure. With Cubism, for example, Picasso deliberately rejected the longstanding rule that painting content could have only one viewing point. By repeatedly painting in a manner to prove his radical assertion, he astounded the art world at the time. But shortly thereafter, when Marcel Duchamp suggested that a lowly urinal from the men's room, if laid flat on its back, could be termed a fountain, the man was nearly laughed out of town. The British painter, Frank Auerbach, is an artist cut from the same cloth as Picasso and Duchamp.

 

From age forty to eighty-five.

Even long before Leonardo made Mona Lisa smile (sort of), there has always been an unwritten rule that a portrait artist should present his or her subject in an attractive light, capturing a likeness and personality while making the individual depicted reasonably attractive, sometimes even to the point of shameless flattery. Over the centuries, some artists had been known to "fudge" such a rule at times in search of truth and character in their sitters, but by and large, no one, not even the revolutionary portrait artist, Andy Warhol, dared break from the past. Then came Auerbach. Not only were his portrait visages not attractive (to put it mildly), but in nearly every case, there is evidence of a concerted effort to make them as desperately ugly as possible. In doing so, the question arises, is he an heir to Picasso or the illegitimate progeny of Duchamp?

The Head of E.O.W., 1951,
Frank Auerbach. The patch
on her forehead is where the
artist erased a hole in the paper.

In the late 1940s, Frank Auerbach was a 17-year-old novice actor. Estella Olive West was the daughter of the philosopher O.S. Wauchope. She was a feisty 32-year-old amateur actress and mother of three. The two were cast together in a play by Peter Ustinov where they first met. Estella's husband, Dr. Michael Walter West, died in a freak accident in 1946. She scraped together a living running a boarding house. Shortly thereafter, the young Auerbach moved into the boarding house. Stella was soon not only his mistress, but also his principal model. In 1951, Frank Auerbach painted his first portrait of her, titled The Head of E.O.W. (left). Romantically, they were together off and on for some twenty-three years. Strangely, during this same time, Auerbach married Julia Wolstenholme. They had a son, Jake, born in 1958. Not surprisingly, the marriage didn't survive the painter's ongoing affair with his model.

Paint so thick his panels were often too heavy to hang
on gallery walls. Here ugly seems more then "to the bone."

This was the first of dozens of paintings and drawings Auerbach completed featuring the face and figure of Estella Olive West (E.O.W.). An though he presents her as no raving beauty, it is among the more conventional portraits he ever painted of her. Like old age, ugly only comes gradually. It did evolve though, beneath layer upon layer of heavy, wet, impasto oils (Auerbach later switched to acrylics). Despite appearances (above) the artist was the consummate perfectionist. Some of his works required up to seventy sittings. After working on a painting each day, Auerbach would carefully place it in a wooden box to dry for up to two weeks, at which time he would remove it and decide what, if anything, he needed to do to improve it.


In painting his wife, Auerbach was no more kind
than he had been in painting his mistress.



Auerbach's relationship with E.O.W. came to an abrupt end in 1973. The works involving E.O.W. were becoming less important than those of the artist's wife, Joan (Julia) Yardley Mills (J.Y.M.). Somehow or another, the two ladies never met.) Auerbach and his wife reunited in 1976. Altogether, Auerbach has completed over seventy portraits and studies of her. In many of his works we see her from slightly below. She is usually looking out of the picture. She seems, preoccupied, and guarded. There always seems to be an intriguing tension, a barrier between the artist and his subject.

Mornington Crescent - Summer Morning, Frank Auerbach. The artist
also rendered a number of urban landscapes chronicling the bombing
and rebuilding of London in the years after the war (bottom).

In 1931, in Berlin, Germany, the time and place of Auerbach's birth, the Nazi party was on the rise against a backdrop of general resentment at the unfairness and resulting austerity imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. The Nazis came to power in 1933. By 1939, when his Jewish parents sent him to school in England, Frank Auerbach was eight years old. That was the last contact he had with them. His parents did not follow their son to England. They underestimated the Nazi party, thinking (or hoping at least) that it was all talk and rhetoric. They were rather elderly when their son was born and perhaps too set in their ways and views. They seemed to think that everything and everyone would eventually settle down. They were wrong. At Auschwitz, they became part of a cast of millions in a tragic epic.

Auerbach's studio--not the kind of place you'd visit in a suit and tie.

Meanwhile, over in England, young Frank Auerbach discovered a black and white reproduction of Turner's the Fighting Temeraire. He came to know Michelangelo Rembrandt, Breughel and most of all, a community spirit of normality in art. After the Second World War, Auerbach acted in small parts in several London theatres while attended painting classes at the Hampstead Garden Suburb Institute. The following year he attended the Borough Polytechnic Institute before entering St. Martin’s School of Art. In 1952 Auerbach studied at the Royal College of Art after being judged unfit for military service. Auerbach acquired Gustav Metzger’s former studio in Camden, London around 1954. It was run down with an outside toilet and riddled with dampness. But it was all he could afford and out of sheer economic need he remained there since otherwise he would have had nothing. For over fifty years he has remained there in a space no more than 25 x 25 feet, though it has been extensively rebuilt and he is now well-off. Yet the feeling of sheer economic need has stayed with him.

Auerbach doesn't take commissions. He paints only friends and
relatives. (Whew, that's a relief!)

Auerbach was taught and influenced by David Bomberg, who encouraged him to look back, beyond Cubism, to Cezanne. Auerbach's work is modern, but in the tradition of Gericault, Delacroix, Ingres, Courbet and Daumier. He is often cast as an Expressionist, though in fact, he's of the Figural movement which followed Abstract Expressionism. His work is complex, dark and brazenly ugly. His paintings are hard to look at and even harder to like. Yet, they are also quite moving and starkly original. Auerbach's work is a million miles away from the traditional rule that pictures should look 'nice.' Much of his work is about rubbing out old images, scraping off old paint, redrawing, repainting, looking again at the composition, even to the point of covering up completely an earlier effort. His paintings reveal tortured faces seemingly crushed by the weight of the paint. To return to my original question: In breaking the rules, is Auerbach a legitimate heir to Picasso or the bastard son of Marcel Duchamp? To him, it matters little. Whatever you think of his work, Auerbach has had a lasting influence upon younger British painters, as seen in the manner in which they have rendered his portrait (top). Neither criticism nor accolades are of much consequence to the eighty-five-year-old painter whose daily routine is seldom altered. He will not move from his studio, nor will he award himself any luxuries. He notes that: "I became solvent so late that it’s too late for me to change."

Liberating: Mornington Crescent, 1965,
Frank Auerbach