On this day in 1863, the German Expressionist Edvard Munch was born. Don’t misunderstand, however; he was a a Norwegian painter, and quite a bit more idiosyncratic than most German Expressionists. He is one of those artists who is cursed to be associated with a single painting. In his case, The Scream, which he painted when he was just 30 years old. But he is so much greater than that.

He was also influenced by the impressionists. And during his time in France, he was doubtless influenced by the post-impressionists. Some of my favorite of his paintings remind me of Gauguin. A quick check of Wikipedia discloses that he was influenced by Gauguin as well as van Gogh and Toulouse-Lautrec. I think I can see the van Gogh to some extent, but my powers of art appreciation are not keen enough to see the influence of the great illustrator.

Here is an example of what I mean. It is The Girls on the Jetty — or rather, one of 18 he painted around 1900:

It is still Munch and Symbolist, but the use of colors strikes me very much like Gauguin. You can see this even more in an earlier painting, At the Roulette Table in Monte Carlo:

I’ve had some difficulty finding much of his later work that really blows me away. That’s not to say that his later work is bad. It is just that there isn’t all that much of it on line — or at least it is hidden beneath a million copies of The Scream and parodies of it. But here is a painting from 1914, Weeping Nude:

Happy birthday Edvard Munch!

The great cartoonist Peter Bagge is 57 today. Is he really great? I think he is. I remember when he first started publishing, his rubbery characterizations and his outrageous sensibility were very new. I’ve always thought that he and Bill Watterson looked kind of similar, but he took it to extremes that fit what he was trying to do with it.

I probably first saw him in Weirdo in the early 1980s. But I really got into him with the first issue of Neat Stuff. Looking at it now, I find it kind of embarrassing. The artwork is great, but the writing is kind of like Mad Magazine for teens. But they had their moments. There was Studs Kirby, every Fox News viewing man you’ve ever met — with sentimental periods where he drinks himself to sleep listening to Brenda Lee records. And there was The Bradleys, a highly dysfunctional family — not really well written but wonderfully rendered. As I recall, this is from the end of a strip where Buddy has purchased The Yardbirds’ greatest hits or something:

You don’t find much Bagge on the internet. At least you don’t compared to the far greater Bernie Wrightson. I assume this is because Bagge is a greedy man who just can’t get enough money. The last time I saw him, he was publishing cartoons in the libertarian Reason Magazine. I’ve since learned that he also writes articles. I really don’t want to know. You start with an artist — generally not the greatest analysts. Then you combine that with the libertarian thinking of someone at the top of his profession — who had success very young. This is not a formula for deep thinking. But Woody Allen being a child molester doesn’t make his films any less great. Peter Bagge being a libertarian doesn’t make his comics any less great. Am I saying these are the same? Only in the sense that they both show a lack of impulse control.

Happy birthday Peter Bagge!

On this day in 1886, the great Mexican painter Diego Rivera was born. He is best known for his murals, but that came later. Born into a wealthy family, he got plenty of encouragement and instruction for his early obsession with drawing. In 1907, he went to study in Europe, eventually making it to Paris. He developed a close friendship with the slightly older Amedeo Modigliani. It was around this time that he started painting in the cubist style. Later he followed in the style of Cézanne. Rivera was something of an artistic sponge — an attribute that would serve him well in his later mural painting.

On his return to Mexico in 1921, Rivera got involved in a government sponsored mural program. This is also when he became actively involved in leftist politics. He combined the two beautifully. And it wasn’t especially controversial until he left Mexico. It’s funny the way countries are. They don’t have a problem with people like Rivera because of the specifics of their politics. They have a problem with such people for not telling them exactly what they want to hear. So first he was thrown out of the Soviet Union and then he was thrown out of the United States.

Between 1932 and 1933, Rivera created a 27-panel mural, Detroit Industry. Here is a detail of one particularly stunning panel:

In the early 1950s, when the country was crazy under McCarthyism, a large sign was put up that explained how great an artistic accomplishment it was, even though the politics were terrible. Again: what did they know of his politics? Only that they were “wrong.” When people act the way groups do, we call them neurotic. No one would take a person seriously who was so insecure that he couldn’t brook the smallest disagreement about how perfect he was. But when our country does it, it is considered noble. It’s very odd. It’s good to have artists and thinkers around to highlight our silliness.

Happy birthday Diego Rivera!

On this day in 1891, the great painter Otto Dix was born. Other than “modernist,” I don’t know quite what you would call him, even though he is considered a German realist. His work is highly idiosyncratic. There is a kind of cartoon aspect to it at the same time that it is shockingly blunt. That’s especially true of his depictions of war. He fought in the infantry for Germany during World War I — first on the western front, then on the eastern front, and then back on western front. He fought in the war for three years before receiving a “career” ending wound on his neck shortly before the end of the war. He seems to have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder — haunted by nightmares that he rendered in his work.

Here is a picture in four panels, Der Krieg (“The War”), painted from 1929 through 1932. I would not have wanted to live inside his head. The first panel shows men on their way to battle. The second panel shows the battle. And the third panel shows the survivors of the battle. Normally, that would be all in a triptych, which Der Krieg nominally is. But Dix created a fourth panel of the dead and buried. It’s a remarkable, if horrific work:

When the Nazis took over Germany, they did not get along with Dix, whose work was considered “degenerate.” He was forced to paint landscapes. But after World War II got going, he was drafted in the German militia. Toward the end of the war, he was captured by French soldiers, which was probably all for the best.

Dix created a lot of other work that is more traditionally beautiful. Here is one of many of his wife Martha from the early 1920s. Notice the cream skin tone everywhere except on the right hand:

Happy birthday Otto Dix!

On this day in 1858, the great Ukrainian painter Marie Bashkirtseff was born. The reason you have probably never heard of her is that she died of tuberculosis when she was only 25 years old. But she was a master. She was an admirer of Jules Bastien-Lepage, although I think she shows greater technique. What I especially like about her is that depending upon the work, she can use the finest of brush strokes while at other times using very crude strokes as found with the impressionists. Of course, she is of that time and Bastien-Lepage was an influence on the movement.

Bashkirtseff is also known as a diarist and sculptor — probably because we have so little of her work. She died in Paris on Halloween in 1884. Normally, I would provide a bit of her work. But I found this excellent three-minute video that gives a very nice overview of her work — even including one of her sculptures. She was an amazing talent.

Happy birthday Marie Bashkirtseff!

On this day in 1898, the great surrealist painter René Magritte was born. When I was younger, I didn’t much care for his art. There were a good too many apples and bowlers and too little of the overwhelming brilliance of Salvador Dalí. But over time, I came to appreciate Magritte’s art. For one thing, he has much less of a clear style than Dalí. And so the genius behind the paintings is clear.

It’s also the case that Magritte didn’t produce that many works. This may be partly because he wasn’t that successful until quite late into his life. In fact, he had a career arc rather like that of Cervantes: producing work throughout his life, but doing many things to support himself. But it is also the case that he tended to have very distinct thoughts behind his work.

By the late 1920s, he was producing very interesting — clearly surrealistic — work. Some of this, such as The Treachery of Images, is over-intellectual. But other works, such as The Empty Mask, seem to be much deeper than Magritte himself was aware of. I think that is important for an explicitly intellectual artist; the work has to be somewhat out of control or it becomes contrived.

Magritte was always interested in the question of what was behind images. We see that as early as The Empty Mask. It is a profound question to consider coming from an artist who is, after all, only interested in the surfaces of things. But in fact, every image is just covering up another and on and on. In the mid-1930s, he looked at this quite explicitly in his two paintings The Human Condition, where a painting rendered inside the painting covers up exactly the reality it displays.

He did some other interesting work around this time such as Not to be Reproduced and On the Threshold of Liberty. And then his production slowed way down for a decade because of the war. He produced some good work and experimented a lot with color in ways that he didn’t seem to bother with much at other times. And then in the late 1940s, he seemed to arrive at a fairly dependable style that we know him for as in paintings like The Art of Life.

In the early 1950s, he produced a series of paintings, The Empire of Lights. The concept is simple enough. But it is lovely:

Magritte didn’t produce his best known work until shortly before he died, The Son of Man. What Magritte wrote about it could stand as a general description of his entire output:

Happy birthday René Magritte!

On this day in 1882, the great painter Wyndham Lewis was born. He was also a writer of some repute — probably more famous for that during his lifetime. He wrote about a dozen novels and countless essays, short stories, plays, and even poetry. I’ve never read any of his work, but I probably will now. I am going to focus on his painting here.

He was probably the greatest artist in the Vorticist movement. But he is so much more than that. Partly, this is because the movement didn’t much last. Apparently, everyone was so depressed by World War I that they all slunk off in their own personal ways. As a result, his work is quite eclectic. Actually, I’m not that fond of his — or anyone else’s — Vorticist work.

In the Tate’s discussion of Lewis, it mentions that he “produced a bewildering quantity and range of work.” It is very true. It is hard to get a handle on exactly what he was doing. He was one of those crazy talented people who grab different influences the way we lesser mortals breath air. For example, in his battlefield painting A Battery Shelled, I certainly see Vorticism, but there is much more:

But later, he was doing Tyros as seen above in his self-portrait. And later still, he often did more realism as in the following painting of his wife “Froanna” (Gladys Anne Hoskins):

Most of his work is quite splendid, and I’ll admit that the work I don’t like is probably more a failing of mine than his. It is well worth checking out.

Happy birthday Wyndham Lewis!

On this day in 1840, the great painter Claude Monet was born. I have to admit: I tend to discount him. This is always a problem when you are too successful. He has been so copied, he was hugely influential among his peers, and he was incredibly prolific. Add this to the fact that he makes painting look easy, and he is an easy artist to ignore. But he is profoundly awesome.

I always find people like him amazing. He really did have a vision. He was able to paint in the Academic style; he just refused to. I can’t see myself doing that. I want to be liked too much. So that kind of dedication to your vision impresses me greatly. He was apparently very self-assured from a young age. In his early teens he was good enough to sell charcoal caricatures. He bounced around a lot from there, learning much from a large number of people. Perhaps most important, he met Édouard Manet when he was about 20.

From there, he traveled quite a lot for the next decade — including two years with the military in Algeria. By his early 30s, he was one of the main figures of what would eventually become known as the impressionists — so named because of this painting he displayed at their first exhibit, Impression, Sunrise. The main thing about it is its distinctive rendering of light that would remain with Monet his entire career:

I’ve always been very impressed with Arrival of the Normandy Train, Gare Saint-Lazare from four years later:

But there is so much more. He painted well over a thousand paintings in his life. And he painted for almost another 50 years — much of it quite marvelous.

Happy birthday Claude Monet!