Happy Halloween: The Vision of Faust by Luis Falero

For Halloween I’m sharing a dainty dish called The Vision of Faust, by Luis Ricardo Falero (1851-1896).

Falero is a little-remembered painter with a marked taste for the outrageous and the bizarre.  He often painted witches, wizards and occult sequences from literary classics, and though his oeuvre was recherché, he was quite a gifted painter in his own right. 

Falero was born in Toldeo and entered the Spanish navy at an early age.  However, his artistic inclinations were stronger than his military ties, and he left the navy for a career in art.  He studied in Paris and London, where he later settled.  Falero had a deep and abiding love for astronomy, and the heavens around us were often integrated into his paintings.

Falero died early, only 45, though somewhat worn out by strife and ruin.  At the time of his death he lost a paternity suite brought against him by 17 year-old Maud Harvey, who was seduced by Falero while serving as both his housemaid and model.  He dismissed Harvey from service when she became pregnant with his child, and broke his promise to support her and the baby.  She won a judgment against him of five shillings a week.

Ironically, Johann Goethe’s Faust concerns a middle-aged scholar (the somewhat flabby man in the painting) who sells his soul to the devil, Mephistopheles, in return for regained youth and sensual pleasures. He seduces a young girl, Gretchen, who bears his illegitimate child, kills the baby and is sentenced to death, but her soul is spared from Mephisto's clutches.

Goethe's Faust is an extraordinarily influential work, influencing operas, plays, films and … this picture.  Aside from grand, cosmological themes, Falero was obsessed with the female nude, of which he was a master.  His command of feminine anatomy was immense, and his skills at coloration and tone formidable.  He rendered the female form with great charm and occasional wit. 

In fact, the erotic urges of some artists are, if you’ll pardon the expression, naked on the canvas.  It takes only a glance at Michelangelo’s body of work, for instance, to see his intense passion for muscular youths (the same can be said for American artist Paul Cadmus), and the overt passion by which Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet painted their female subjects made their passion for women visible.  Falero’s erotic impulse is blatantly visible in his finished work.  Note the rounded sensuality of the women in The Vision of Faust, and the creamy pinkish-white coloration.  The women fly though the air visibly contorted by passion or erotic release – it is an extremely sexual representation.  Indeed, even the hag/witch in the lower portion of the picture seems fired by a raw, sexual energy: one of her hands rests wantonly on the hip of a sensual woman, while the other fondles a ram’s horn. 

Faust, too, though pudgy and obviously middle-aged, is sexually objectified by his warm coloration, and, more importantly, by the echoes of his figure to the ram behind him.  A trick of the light playing on Faust’s hair gives the impression of horns, and his beard all too obviously mimics the ram’s profile.

Perhaps one of the key reasons this picture is so effective is its brazen, shameless sense of … blasphemy.  The thick, cottony clouds highlighted and lit from behind are strongly reminiscent of hundreds of religious paintings, and the huge, menacing bat in the upper left seems to be an inverse image of the dove. Where religious pictures often have the transcendent resurrection of the dead, Faust features a reanimated corpse, its skull face leering hideously.

The Vision of Faust is a remarkable painting … I just wouldn’t want it hanging on my wall.

Happy Halloween!

Renoir Drawing, Peasant Girl With Dog

This very pleasant drawing, Peasant Girl With Dog, was done in red chalk on cream-colored paper by Pierre-August Renoir (1841-1919) in 1894, one of the most celebrated Impressionist painters.  With perhaps the exception of Edgar Degas, drawings by Impressionist masters are relatively rare – mainly because Impressionists gave up on drawing.

The characteristics we associate with Impressionism largely emerged from the paintings of Renoir and Claude Monet executed between 1867 and 1870.  Between the two of them, they changed the ‘language’ of painting, the after-effects of which are felt to this day.   Impressionists painted directly from the subject (dancers, farmers, seascapes, picnicers) to retain the changing nature of appearances.  They achieved this effect by using broadly painted broken brush-strokes, and by trying to capture objects as they change.  (It is not unusual for an Impressionist still life to include slightly wilted flowers.)  I also think of the advent of Impressionism as the era in which the mind and optic nerve parted ways: the largely intellectual, skill-based discipline of drawing (and painting) was largely abandoned in favor of sensation. 

The canon of Impressionists paintings has, once this new language of painting became more familiar, become very popular with the public.  This is largely because many of the Impressionists (Renoir, Monet, Degas et al) were wonderful colorists.   They painted slices of life rather than epic history or Biblical pictures, or formal portraits, and with this revolution, the centuries-old artistic tradition that began in the early Renaissance began to erode.

Renoir was born in Limoges and moved to Paris in 18S45. His early work was as a porcelain painter, and he used the money he earned to attend the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, where he became a pupil of Gleyre with Monet, Bazille and Sisley. He exhibited in four of the eight Impressionist exhibitions which launched the movement and was one of the leading lights of the revolution until it was perceived that his native good humor led the more zealous Impressionists to dismiss him for not being ‘serious.’  (It is a mystery to your correspondent why ‘dour’ is equated with ‘serious,’ but that is perhaps the topic of a future post.)

We’ll look at Renoir’s life in greater detail tomorrow, but till then, let’s look at the above drawing.  The overall effect is a very pleasant one, but it seems to your correspondent to be little more than an artful doodle.  The woman’s anatomy looks to be sound, but much more is suggested than depicted.  The arm supporting the head seems a bit crabbed, and the head itself unevenly fitted to the torso.  The dog resting on the woman seems to be to scale, until one begins to wonder upon what low object the woman is sitting, or ponders how big is the bottom of the dog’s body.  The other dog is standing on its hind legs, unless it is a dry run for the final depiction of the dog.  The trees and fields are sketched out with a few loose lines, but mass is convincingly created.  So, like much of the Impressionist canon, the overall effect is quite nice, but it does not really support detailed viewing.

If I sound prejudiced against the Impressionists, well …, I am.  While I love much of the work, I cannot separate my momentary optic pleasure from the realization that the movement was the beginning of the end of art.  As Impressionists largely abandoned the discipline of drawing and the long apprenticeship of the Beaux-Arts tradition, art became less about skill and more about ‘feeling.’  It may be a big step between the pretty pictures of Renoir and the horrors of de Kooning, but Impressionism was the necessary first step that made the ugly irrelevancies of Modernism possible.

Atkinson Grimshaw’s November Moonlight

One of the sadder side effects of the way art history is written is that great masters of light and color are under-appreciated when critical rhetoric moves in a different direction.  Case in point: John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836-1893).

Grimshaw’s story is an interesting one.  Born in Leeds to a working class family (his father was a policeman), Grimshaw first found employment as a railway clerk.  However, he dreamed of becoming an artist, a choice that did not sit well with his father.  Grimshaw did have a London studio for a brief time, but, mostly, he recorded life in Northern England and parts of Scotland.  He bought Knostrop Hall on the outskirts of Leeds and was a prolific painter until his early death from cancer in 1893.  Four of his children would themselves become painters.  (A well-read man, Grimshaw named all of his children after characters in Tennyson poems.)

Though Grimshaw painted many types of pictures (portraits, ‘society’ pictures and even the odd fairy painting), it is his landscape work examining different types of light and weather that best exemplified his talents.  Grimshaw had a genius for weather, and his use of light allowed him to capture both mood and appearance in his landscapes.  He had a unique sense of twilight, of moonlight, of fog and rain – where lesser painters would create mud, his brush left limpid delineations of light and tone.

Grimshaw lived and worked during an interesting time in art history.  His contemporaries included, for example, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.  Grimshaw was not part of an avant-garde, had no particular or dramatic ‘story’ of his life, and he created little controversy.  Art history moved on without him – a great mistake even without the benefit of hindsight.  Now that representational painting and artistic expertise are having their own renaissance, Grimshaw once again is attracting notoriety.  A new retrospective exhibit called Atkinson Grimshaw – Painter of Moonlight is running from 16 April 2011 to 4 September 2011 at Mercer Art Gallery in Harrogate.

Let’s close the week with a look at Grimshaw’s November Moonlight.  The cold, grayish-blue of the moonlight illuminates this streetscape.  The rutted, damp road reflects this cold light, and the dead trees stand out in dramatic relief.  The cart rider is alone, which underscores the unforgiving nature of the season.  Everything about this picture says late autumn, chilly air and the onset of winter.  However, Grimshaw brings a vital element of life by employing yellowish light to the parlor windows, creating a sense of warmth, of hearth and of refuge.  The stone wall, however, which is clearly illuminated by the cold moon, separates our rider from the home – he is alone, with only the cold moonlight for company.

This is a type of painting seldom done today, filled with quiet mastery, human connection to landscape and sublime emotion.  We could do much worse than reconsidering John Atkinson Grimshaw.