MPS MEN PORTRAITS SERIES n° 6 version française
THE SEA
English translation: Ann Menuhin
menportraits.blogspot.com © Francis Rousseau 2011-2020
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John La Farge (1835–1910) Swimmer Watercolor,1866 Yale University Art
In mid-19th century Puritan New England, this composition did not receive the best of welcomes! This idealized representation of freedom, through a lone swimmer, naked and in the open sea, was totally misunderstood. If it seems obvious to the spectator of the 20th century that he is a swimmer with a rather enviable physique as well as impeccable crawl movements, this was not the case when it was presented to the public in 1866. John La Farge was then asked exactly what the subject was? It must be said in the defense of the American public of the time that even in Europe, the subject would have, if not shocked, at least aroused much the same incomprehension. Swimming in the sea? What an extravagant idea! Swimming was almost an act reserved for harsh seamen in distress or a few cannibalistic "savages" of the South Seas, but it would never have occurred to any civilized man to embark on such an adventure. While in ancient Greece and Rome swimming in open water or in a basin was taught to every citizen, it was not until the end of the nineteenth century in Europe before we again witness baths in the sea. .. and again in accoutrements which were very far from the birthday suit of this watercolor or the clothes adopted by the Romans, the Greeks, the Assyrians or the Egyptians of the third millennium before the Christian era! Beyond the misunderstanding that the act of free swimming aroused, the public also failed to understand that doing such a subject in watercolor was a technical feat. It was undoubtedly in Paris, where he studied (briefly but effectively) with the history painter Thomas Couture in the company of the very young Puvis de Chavannes and Edouard Manet, that John La Farge acquired such mastery of this technique. Rather than the Pacific, where he only went 20 years after painting this watercolor, it is believed that it was also probably in Paris and its museums that La Farge culled the subject of this open water swimmer, perhaps while looking at the antique vases of the Louvre. His first drawings and landscapes made in Newport, demonstrated an originality in the tones of colors which also owed a lot to the influences of Japanese art of which he was one of the very first specialists. Although his career was mainly spent in fresco painting, he also painted numerous canvases and watercolors during his travels in the East and the South Pacific. He then visited the Japan he admired so much and, from 1890, French Polynesia and Hawaii, where he painted remarkable landscapes and volcanoes, always in watercolors.
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his composition alludes to one of the roles attributed by Greek mythology to the Titan Prometheus: his role as the creator of humanity. We see the Titan sitting on a rock, looking at the sea. He holds in his hand the inert man he has just modeled in his image from clay. Prometheus' gaze is turned towards the sea - symbol of femininity and life - from which the goddess Athena must emerge. Having sprung from Zeus's head, she is supposed to come and breathe life into this body of inert clay. Pausanias places this scene in Panopée, in Phocis and, according to his version, it is the brother of Prometheus, the Titan Epimetheus (the fool) who, not knowing what to do to help men, called Prometheus for his aid in imagining a plan. Prometheus at that moment thought that he had to make sure that Man could stand on two legs like the gods themselves, rather than continue to crawl like an animal. From water and earth, he therefore fashioned a larger body for him, which, like that of the gods, could assume the upright position. This episode of the creation of Man from the earth is borrowed from Near Eastern legends and in particular Sumerian, but the meanings differ radically from one another according to the Eastern or the Greek mythological version.
Otto Greiner (1869-1916) Prometheus (1909) National Gallery of Canada
In Sumer, Man is created at the request of the gods in order to serve them as best as possible while in the Greek myth, Prometheus creates a man who is almost a rival to the gods (who above all did not wish that Man be endowed with intelligence). In another myth, Prometheus will even try to steal the fire of Olympus to offer to men ... Such repeated provocations could hardly go unpunished on the part of the gods of Olympus! At the third provocation, Zeus' terrible anger was unleashed against Prometheus. The master of Olympus had him chained to a rock, where an eagle was to devour his liver (the only organ that regenerates itself) for eternity ... Otto Greiner was the first German artist to use the technique of lithography not only for reproduction, but also for the creation of his works. His naturalistic representations, like this Prometheus, quite characteristic of his time, find less echo among the public today. Otto Greiner also did many portraits as well as mythological and fantastic subjects like this one. They even constitute the bulk of his 112 graphic works and a few monumental paintings. .
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Winslow Homer (1836-1910 Sailing a Dory, 1880 Watercolor and pencil on paper Private collection (via Christie’s) .
The summer of 1880 was a rich and very productive period for Winslow Homer, considered today as one of the most important American realist painters of the 19th century. During that year, indeed, he lived in almost complete solitude, totally isolated inside a lighthouse on Ten Pound Island, in Gloucester Harbor, spending his time painting the harbour and its inhabitants. Among the many boats moored in Gloucester Harbor, Winslow Homer seems to have particularly noticed the dories which he painted almost continuously! As can be seen in this watercolor, it was not the illustration itself, the description of the faces and their expression that interested the painter but above all the light and the general atmosphere. By using successive washes to render the movements of the foam of the waves in the wake of the dory, by creating this magnificent pattern of the white sail barring the horizon, Winslow Homer wonderfully transmits to the viewer both all the liveliness and the tranquil beauty of the summers on this coast which marked him so strongly.
If we take a purely technical point of view regarding the watercolors of this period, we note a definite change in the painter's style which moves further and further away from the influence of the French painters of the Barbizon School. Winslow Homer scholar Helen Cooper notes that in the summer of 1880 “Homer's use of color took a leap forward. He simplified his palette using only Prussian Blue, Cobalt, Vermilion, Yellow Ocher and Black. On heavy-screen papers, the initial pencil drawing is extremely sketchy and barely noticeable, relying mostly on the use of the colors that spread out in abstract blocks. The overall structure of the composition is thus defined more by the color than by the pencil line ”. It was such an innovative technique that it was completely misunderstood by critics of the time, who saw it as "painterly laziness" whereas in fact it was all the liveliness of the sea itself that Winslow Homer brought into people's homes.
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Henry Stacy Marks R.A. (1829-1898), Sailor on Look Out. ca.1855 Private collection
enry Stacy Marks was an English artist who became interested in Shakespearean and medieval themes early in his career, vaguely social subjects in the middle, and then decorative art depicting almost exclusively birds and ornithologists at the end of his life. ! This canvas of a sailor, sitting on the deck of a ship at sea readying his telescope to do his "tour of the horizon" is therefore not one of his usual themes. This is undoubtedly a commissioned painting or one of his "humorous works" as he liked to call them. Henry Stacy Marks was one of the founding members of the St John's Wood Clique where he was quite famous for his comedy performances. It was not necessary, they said, "to take his words any more seriously than his paintings" ... So act! It is true that the earnestness of this sailor, who never seems to have left the salons of the Admiralty, with his impeccable dress, his pretty boater, his ample jacket with three stripes, and his immaculate white trousers, can raise a smile. Planted straight up like a stake, observing a maritime landscape where nothing is visibly happening, it can, on the other hand, leave the viewer pensive! The impression of serenity and deep calm that emanates from this composition is due more to the emptiness of the expanse of sea than to what the character himself expresses, as in reality he doesn't express much of anything! But as Henry Stacy Marks himself liked to say, "It is precisely when you try to paint the apparent nothing that things start to get interesting and the world becomes full of realities." Especially in the maritime world where the apparent surface nothingness always hides an unsuspected abundance of life that can spring up at any moment from the abyssal depths. Maybe that's what this contemplative sailor is trying to tell us, after all.
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Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) Baigneurs vers 1890 Musée d'Orsay, Paris
John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) The Bathers, 1917 Worcester Art Museum
Alexander Deïneka (1899-1969) The Bathers Private collection
At the end of the 19th century and until the second half of the 20th century, in the wake of Paul Cézanne and his famous Bathers, the theme of men bathing enjoyed growing success. Many European and American painters seized upon this theme, which made it possible to represent naked men (almost in a classic style) frolicking in a natural landscape, free from the constraints of studio poses. Surprisingly enough, the theme was also an inspiration across the "Iron Curtain" in Hungary, Poland and the Soviet Union. Thus the official painter and sculptor of the Soviet regime, Alexander Deïneka often painted bathers, with the intention of illustrating the healthy and sporty character of Stalinist youth. He who produced, in the 1920s, the first great revolutionary work of art with The Defense of Petrograd and then magnified the heroic acts of the Second World War through the Suburbs of Moscow or November 1941, was also the champion of sea bathing in the great outdoors with friends and leisure activities which the regime now allowed everyone to enjoy. In theory only, and only within the framework of official propaganda, because Stalinist reality was very different from this idyllic image.
The astonishing painting above is of an unusual lightness for the Soviet Union. Despite the modesty of the representation of the male body that it illustrates, it is exceptional in the undeniably homosexual theme that it addresses, a subject which the Stalinist regime hardly accepted or joked about. Indeed, we are especially struck by the feminine aspect of the blond bather to the left of the frame, seated on his rock like "the little mermaid of Copenhagen" with, at his feet, a still life of apples and pears, delicately placed on a white handkerchief. Sitting on a brightly striped towel, he seems to have caught the eye of the rest of the little troop! A rather unique example of homosexual representation under the Stalinist regime to such an extent that it was thought to be a canvas painted "under cover" ... so to speak!
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Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) Thomas Eakins and J.Laurie Wallace at the Shore, 1883 The MET, New York
Not content with being an accomplished painter, watercolorist and teacher, Thomas Eakins was a talented photographer. Working with a wooden camera and glass plate negatives developed with the platinum printing process, he distinguished himself from most other painters of his generation by mastering the technical aspects of this new medium and by demanding that his students do the same. By 1880, Eakins had already incorporated the camera into his life as a professional painter as well as his private life. He thus repeated, without really knowing it, the misunderstood experience of Gustave Caillebotte in France. The vast majority of photographs attributed to him, which are kept today at the MET in New York, are figure studies (nude and dressed), portraits of his students, his family and close friends and even of himself (as in the photo opposite). More than 225 negatives survive in the Bregler Collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and approximately 800 photographs are currently attributed to Eakins and his circle sufficient proof of Eakins’s intense activity in the field of photography.
For Eakins, the camera was a teaching device comparable to anatomical drawing, a tool that the modern artist must know how to use in order to train the eye to see what was really in front of him; this is what he called optical truth. Professor in 1882 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, one of the only avant-garde art schools in the United States where photography was taught, he lost his post 4 years later for having allowed a female audience to attend an anatomy class based on a male model ... This artistic freedom inherited from the classical world that Eakins strove to bring to life in his academic programs at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and in his Arcadian paintings appears as an important element in many of his photographic studies of nudes and of his subjects "at the beach". These photographs, much more than his paintings, celebrate the male physique. Even today, more than a century after their creation, the frontal and unapologetic nudity of these nudes has the same power to shock the more puritanical eyes of contemporary America ... where puritanism still holds sway!
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Francis Cadell (full name Francis Campbell Boileau Cadell) is a Scottish colorist painter, famous for his depictions of elegant Scottish interiors as well as for his landscapes of Iona Island and for his portraits of men. Encouraged by the painter Arthur Melville to leave at the age of 16, he studied in Paris at the Académie Julian where he quickly came into contact with the French avantgarde of his time and discovered Matisse. The latter had a lasting influence on him. Cadell was also influenced by the more classical technique of James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Édouard Manet. After his return to Scotland, he exhibited regularly in Edinburgh and Glasgow notably at the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts - as well as in London. Cadell was a left-handed painter. When he was a student at the Royal Scottish Academy, the President tried to prevent him from painting with his left hand on the pretext that "no left-handed artist has become great". Cadell replied, "But sir… aren't there the great paintings by Michelangelo?" "
Francis Cadell (1883-1937) In the Navy National Gallery of Scotland
The president did not answer and left the room. A comrade then asked Cadell how he knew that Michelangelo was left-handed. Cadell had to admit: "I don't know it, but neither does the president apparently". Between October 2011 and March 2012, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art conducted a major retrospective of Cadell's work, the first since that held at the National Gallery of Scotland in 1942. In the portrait opposite, a Royal Navy seaman is shown in his uniform worn during official ceremonies. This uniform, composed of a navy blue jacket with a socalled "mandarin" collar, is characteristic of the Royal Navy and makes it immediately identifiable. The ranks of the officers were then worn on the sleeves, as here. We can say that this jacket has inspired the uniforms of sailors around the world both by its shape and by its color, navy blue and white so symbolic of the navy that it gave its name to this deep "blue"! Its current shape has not changed since 1906, when it replaced a version introduced in 1856 that featured a jacket without a turned-up collar.
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Paul-Gustav Fischer (1860-1934) A man on the beach, 1910 Private owner
Paul Gustave Fischer was born in Copenhagen to a family of Jewish-Polish descent. His father Philip owned a paint and lacquer business and, having wished to become a painter in his youth, oriented his son towards this activity rather than another, hoping to realize his unfulfilled childhood dream through his children. Like his brother Johannes August Fischer (1854-1921) who also became a painter, Paul Gustave attended the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen for two years. He began with paintings of street scenes set in Copenhagen, set in twilight, on gray days or in rainy and snowy weather showing the daily activity of people and illustrating the atmosphere of this bygone Copenhagen. Between 1891 and 1895 he stayed in Paris, associating with painters from the Impressionist movement and returned with a heightened sense of color that he immediately developed in his paintings. Subsequently, Fischer visited Germany and Italy several times, traveled to Scandinavia and continued to paint his favorite themes. He also signed several paintings showing scenes of nude bathing, taking place on sunny beaches. His works are part of the Danish realist movement and then the naturalist movement. During his career, Fischer also developed an interest in posters, drawing his inspiration for this from the works of Théophile Alexandre Steinlen and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Jules Chéret published these works in The Masters of the Poster (1895-1900).
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Painter Edvard Munch is not particularly known for his male nudes, let alone for his depictions of bathers at the beach. But it turns out that in the era in which he painted, especially the junction between the 19th and 20th centuries, this subject had become very popular. Holidays at spa resorts were in vogue, and people increasingly took up water sports. Added to this was the fact that in the countries of northern Europe, nudism was also becoming very fashionable, even going so far as to be credited with beneficial effects on the body thanks to "immersions in the natural environment". Bathing in the sea and in particular simply bathing was considered the best cleansing (today it looks like the best detox!) possible. Exposure to the sun in sunbathing, the obligatory counterpart to bathing in the sea, amplified the rejuvenating effects on the vital force. This painting represents a virile, muscular and naked man emerging from the cool turquoise sea after a swim (quite a symbol!).
Edvard Munch (1863-1944) Bathing Man, 1918 Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo
The image can also be seen as a reflection of "vitalism", a then fashionable philosophical movement which credited all living beings with a magical vital force. In the north of Europe, this philosophy found an abundant pictorial expression, through the motives of dynamic men ( necessarily naked) indulging in "sport", a word which itself had also become magical and which would, throughout the twentieth century, have the social and political development that we know. A true cultural phenomenon, vitalism was a reaction against industrialization. Rather than opting for rationalism or scientism, vitalism - the true ancestor of ecology - preferred to emphasize instinct, intuition and a life close to nature, the sole guarantee of a healthy body. It seems that the future has proved this right!
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Trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and at the Académie Julian in Paris, Wygrzywalski settled in Rome in 1900. During his stay in Italy, he made copies of works by Renaissance masters, in particular Caravaggio, Raphael, Guercino, Velasquez or Titian. In 1908 he moved to Lviv, in western Ukraine, where he was commissioned to decorate the walls of the city's Chamber of Commerce and Industry. It was at this time that he began to take an interest in painting trades and in particular seafaring trades including that of fishermen. These canvases were part of the naturalist and realistic movements which then agitated Northern Europe. They had a certain success, particularly in Poland where the vigor and freshness of this style was very appealing.
Felix Michał Wygrzywalski (1875-1944) Rybacy ciągnący sieci National Museum in Warsaw
MEN PORTRAITS _____________________ THE SEA At 22, George Bellows trained with the New York painter Robert Henri. His representations of the daily life of townspeople and his scenes of boxing fights, always very eventful, make him famous. Bellows is a member of the Ash Can School group of painters, characterized by a marked interest in highly realistic painting chronicling the unadorned daily life of citizens. The snapshot and the photography of reality is the common denominator of the painters of this school. Although paradoxically very composed and very structured, the works of Bellows shine by their expressiveness. All of them, even those painted in the middle of nature, like this maritime scene, illustrate an underground violence already omnipresent in this America of the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Geroge Bellows collaborated on the progressive magazine The Masses.
George Bellows (1882–1925) The Fisherman, 1917 Amon Carter Museum of American Art
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Like many artists who represented the sea and its world at the end of the 19th century, Michael Peter Ancher was a Danish artist belonging to the "realist" current. He painted mainly scenes from everyday life and portraits of members of the small fishing community of Skagen where he was passionate about the work of fishermen and their simple and harsh life in contact with the elements. This initially personal infatuation was the trigger for the Danish pictorial movement known as the School of Skagen, of which Madsen and Ancher were two of the most important figures. One of the paintings that made Ancher famous was the one he painted in 1879: Will they develop this? (Vil han klare pynten) which represents a dramatic moment in the life of the heroic fishermen of Skagen confronted with the reality of working at sea in an often hostile environment. The rather spectacular painting was bought by the King of Denmark, Christian IX, in person from its first exhibition. The king found it represented the soul of Denmarkby referring to the founding (and formative) relationship of his nation to the sea. On the strength of this success, from that
Michael Ancher (1849-1927) Fisherman beside a boat,1889 Statens Museum for Kunst
moment on, almost all of Michael Ancher's great works had a direct and almost always dramatic (one could say melodramatic) relationship with the sea and the world of fishing. Thus Transport of the Rescue Boat Across the Dunes, 1883 ((Redningsbåden køres gennem klitterne) or The Crew is Saved (1894) or The Drowned (1896). The only notable exception to this dramatic atmosphere A walk on the beach (En strandpromenade) which features four women of the Danish upper middle class, in white dresses strolling along the edge of the waves in an atmosphere of serenity and elegance rarely equaled ... Regarding the pictorial style, Michael Ancher was greatly influenced by his classical training at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts which imposed strict rules of composition. By combining this strict classical composition with the teachings of naturalism, Michael Ancher was able to create a unique art which has been called a little awkwardly "modern figurative monumental art" but which is worth much more than this artificial categorization. The truth, the sincerity that still emanate today from the faces of the men and women he painted convey to the viewer an emotion that goes far beyond categorical classifications.
MEN PORTRAITS _____________________ THE SEA This painting representing the port of Copenhagen was commissioned from the Danish painter Albert Edelfelt by the Emperor of Russia Alexander III to be exhibited in Paris during the Universal Exhibition of 1889. The Russian imperial family had known Edelfelt for several years already, had bought several of his works and commissioned, in 1882, the double portrait of the imperial children Michail and Xenia. It was moreover while working on the children's portrait that Edelfelt met Empress Maria Feodorovna, née Dagmar, daughter of King Christian IX of Denmark. The order specified that the painting would be hung on the walls of the Imperial Palace in Helsinki and should represent the entrance to the port. Edelfelt not being a marine painter, he was inspired by sketches and studies of the port of Helsinki and a stay of a few weeks spent sketching and photographing the sites before starting the canvas in his studio in Paris. . The sailor represented is also one of the painter's Parisian models and has nothing in common with a Danish or Russian sailor!
Albert Edelfelt (1854-1905) From the Port of Copenhagen I, ca. 1890 Private collection
The Emperor chose the sketch with the Tre Kroner Bay which featured his Imperial Yacht Derjava (right). The Empress, for her part, wanted to see Holmen and Copenhagen and wanted the presence of a Danish flag (The Dannebrog with a white cross on a red background). She would have preferred a sunny day but the Emperor preferred the foggy day that we see in this version. Edelfelt therefore painted two pictures thus respecting the contradictory wishes of his imperial sponsors.
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Walter Kundzicz (1921-1990?) Sven Holm and David Knight for « Champion Studio », 1960
American photographer Walter Kundzicz was a central and essential figure in 20th century photography of gay male nudes in the United States. Born to parents who themselves had chosen to embrace the brand new and lucrative profession of photographer, Walter Kundzicz was seized at an early age by the focus demon, as he began to photograph his classmates at the age of 5 … and preferably naked. This later earned him the ironic nickname "Mozart of the Male Nude". However, no one other than his parents got to see his scandalous first photographs, most of which are now missing or locked away. After having studied, clandestinely of course !, Nude photography in the United States, a country then renowned for its obsessive puritanism, Walter Kundzicz had the idea at the age of 25 to found his own photographic art studio bypassing legislation prohibiting the nude in an unexpected way. With Champion Studio, founded in 1950, he set himself the goal of promoting athletic bodies, in a sporting and healthy spirit, in the style of Antiquity, through photographs of famous, or less famous, athletes. However, with a very marked preference for athletes wearing ultra low cut and extremely tight swimsuits, sometimes even cut in fabrics so transparent and so diaphanous that they seemed to not exist at all! These photos, in black and white, always very artistically staged, quickly made Champion Studio the leading actor in the art of sports photography, in other words that of the artistic male nude. Walter Kundzicz being interested only in the male nude, he very quickly attracted the sympathy of homosexuals in large cities (New York, San Francisco, Hollywood…) who were just beginning to form a community. In the 1960s, Champion Studio productions took a decisive step towards success with the systematic reproduction, in very exaggerated colors, of the anatomies of these men caught in very poorly filtering nets! . The catalog also grew somewhat, adding to the beach and bathers, baseball players, Bonanza style cows boys, construction workers, firefighters ... in short, everything that would constitute the historical heritage of gay iconography . At the height of his notoriety Walter Kundzicz even edited his own magazine "Big and Go Guys", but in the early 1970s cinematic and photographic pornography dealt a heavy blow to Champion Studio that amateurs now deemed timid, overly modest and oldfashioned. Very quickly ruined, Walter Kundzicz closed shop. The tight underwear shots no longer appealed to homosexual customers and Walter Kundzicz's collection now seemed doomed to oblivion, when a providential collector, John Cox, decided to buy it back in full. Since then and for obscure reasons of inheritance, the collection is still in MR Cox's safe ...and he never shows it! A book published by the prestigious Taschen art publisher, Goliath's Champion, however, allows those (male or female) who do not know the photos of Walter Kundzicz to familiarize themselves with his work, whose role was decisive in the history of the American gay community.
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Arturo Noci (1874- 1953) Protrait of Alexander Bonnyman Jr. 1944 Private Collection
The sea is obviously not only a place of leisure, it is also and above all a place of food supply, a place of discovery and adventure and also, unfortunately, a place of often bloody fighting. Figures like the one shown in this painting largely attest to this. Alexander Bonnyman Jr. (1910-1943) was an officer in the United States Marine Corps and was killed in action at the age of 34 on Betio Atoll in the Gilbert Islands during World War II. The Betio Atoll is featured as a backdrop in this posthumous portrait of Alexander Bonnyman, commissioned by the Admiralty for its gallery of heroes. Combat Engineer Alexander Bonnyman Jr. received the Medal of Honor, Purple Heart, Presidential Unit Citation, the Asia-Pacific Campaign Medal with three bronze stars and the WWII Victory Medal posthumously for his actions in the strategically important assault on a Japanese bomb shelter during the Battle of Tarawa. Bonnyman's civilian background, temperament, and skill played an important role in Tarawa in November 1943. When the assault troops were brought to a standstill by heavy enemy artillery fire, Bonnyman organized and led - on his own initiative - the explosion of several Japanese installations. On the second day of the battle, Bonnyman, determined to break through the enemy's strong defensive line, led a demolition team of 21 Marines in an assault at the entrance to a huge bomb shelter that contained around 150 Japanese soldiers. . When the Japanese retaliated, Bonnyman stood on the front edge of the position and killed three of the attackers, but was himself killed while ordering new charges. The battle continued for another 10 to 15 minutes, with all the Japanese defenders flushed out. Of Bonnyman's initial assault group of 21 Marines, 13 had survived. Betio Island was declared secure the same day. As with all sailors who died on duty, Bonnyman's body was buried at sea. As for Arturo Noci, he was already a well-known painter in the United States, where he emigrated from 1923, when he received the commission for this portrait. His stint at the Venice Biennale in 1901 was memorable, even if we do not find in this very classic canvas evidence of his experiments in divisionism, a technique of subdivision of color which had its followers in Europe as well as in the USA.
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Max Beckmann (1884- 1950) Young Men by the Sea 1943 Saint Louis Art Museum (SLAM)
We used to situate Max Beckmann outside the groups or the great artistic movements of the History of Art. If it is true that his work has given an account of each of the dramas that the world in which he has lived has known, he has always taken care never to want to be the illustrator ... even if he was undeniably the painter. ! In the approach of his time, marked by the two great world conflicts, he still adopts a distanced attitude, considering this theatrical stage on which the tragedy and comedy of human life are played out with hindsight. The same goes for the men who are agitated there: always masked actors or acrobats ... After the First World War, his style became more personal and recognizable with now famous stylistic characteristics, such as the emaciated faces of the figures and the marked or even highlighted outlines of their silhouette. In the painting opposite, preserved in the United States, four men are gathered by the sea on a tiny sandy beach. A subject that could be trivial. If his way of painting it, its framing, its colors, did not make it extraordinary in the true sense of the term. The bodies as much as the accessories and clothes (notably the white gown with the Greco-Latin border) that they wear, encourage identification with this or that figure of mythology. The beach decor, the flute played by one of the men (Pan?), The gourd of wine in the hands of another (Bacchus?), So many elements favoring the evocation of ritual celebrations. However, there is no visible joy in this ritual, which seems rather dark, secret and surprisingly still. The mystery of what is playing out here is exacerbated by the dark and faded tones of this grayish seaside and by the constrained grouping of the bodies, concentrated in the narrow, high space of the composition. The central figure standing, the arms crossed in an authoritarian posture (the Sphinx?), Barring at the height of his penis, the passage towards the sea, with the crouching figure in a white toga (Oedipus?) Further underline the feeling of strangeness of the 'together. The obvious isolation of these four characters despite their improbable proximity in the image, suddenly appears very unreal, emerges from a dream. And it is true that there is in this canvas, as in many of Beckmann's paintings, and although it is mostly unconscious, an irreparably Freudian atmosphere. The dream, the joking expressions of the unconscious, the repressed arise under each gesture, in each color ... These four men huddled together by the sea like legendary quadruplets already strangers to each other at the sea. coming out of the mother obviously says more than they seem ... In 1947, just two months before Beckmann emigrated permanently to the United States, a poem about this painting was sent to him by an anonymous sender from St. Louis, Missouri. On reading the poem, the artist said he was surprised at the accuracy of the interpretation of the central figure, described by his correspondent as a mystic. In the poem, this character in the shadows (and in the shadows) says: "The sea, the shore, the sky and us, will never be bound or released".
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This composition, like Nude on a Cliff Top in Howth, probably dates from the 1900s and originates from pencil drawings modified in 1931 by adding colors to both oil and gouache. The use of these two mediums aiming to overpaint the subject and add a background to place the figure in a new context. Coming at the worst moment of the illness that swept away Orpen, this work appears to be very introspective. In 1931, his life expectancy being very limited, the work could well appear as an idealized vision of himself. The need to put down on the canvas thoughts, feelings and emotions that he had repressed for more than a decade suddenly became more urgent ... Aware of his degradation, he wanted to avoid accumulating technical difficulties and preferring to use previous studies created while in full possession of his abilities.
William Orpen (1878-1931) Nude on the Hill of Howth, 1899 Private collection
1892 - The MET Museum, New York
Like all his last works, this one has for decoration an indeterminate place, a kind of ethereal plane which includes the land, the sea and the sky, the whole populated by seagulls or clouds, foam ... an idealized reference and to Dublin Bay and Howth, without this being certain. This work seems to suggest that the painter is already seeing into the hereafter and can observe his own death. It is not the first time, in any case, in the history of art, that the sea expanse is associated with death. Here she becomes his domain. Much like Van Gogh, Orpen was able in the last months of his life to still produce powerful and enigmatic works like this one, the works of a very great painter.
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he American watercolor painter Andrew Newell Wyeth, classified among regionalist and realist painters, is however much more than this simple classification suggests. He came from a dynasty of artists including his own father Newell Convers Wyeth (1882-1945), a well-known illustrator who frequented celebrities of his time such as Francis Scott Fitzgerald and Mary Pickford. Deciding not to confront his son with national or private education systems, it is he himself who takes care of his education at home, introduces him to art, and especially to the art of landscape rural American. At this time, he admires and is sensitive to the work of the painter Winslow Homer. He later learned to master the techniques associated with egg-based watercolor, tempera. Andrew Wyeth begins painting in shades of browns and grays only. He is inspired by those around him to create his paintings. His favorite subjects are the land and the people of his hometown, as well as his relatives. His pictorial mastery allows him to express his melancholy reflection on the passage of time and human fallibility. He painted very few marines, which gives this one a special flavor. .
Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) Untitled, 1938 Watercolor Private collection
MEN PORTRAITS _____________________ THE SEA
Avec la brise en poupe et par un ciel serein, Voyant le Phare fuir à travers la mâture, Il est parti d'Egypte au lever de l'Arcture, Fier de sa nef rapide aux flancs doublés d'airain. Il ne reverra plus le môle Alexandrin. Dans le sable où pas même un chevreau ne pâture La tempête a creusé sa triste sépulture ; Le vent du large y tord quelque arbuste marin. Au pli le plus profond de la mouvante dune, En la nuit sans aurore et sans astre et sans lune, Que le navigateur trouve enfin le repos ! Ô Terre, ô Mer, pitié pour son Ombre anxieuse ! Et sur la rive hellène où sont venus ses os, Soyez-lui, toi, légère, et toi, silencieuse.
José Maria de Hérédia (1842-1905) Le Naufragé in Les Trophées
Valdemar Irminger (1850-1938) Le naufragé Collection privée
MPS MEN PORTRAITS SERIES n° 6 ©Francis Rousseau 2011-2020 English tTranslation: Ann Menuhin htpp : //menportraits.blogspot.com
version française
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