The Bad Art Cafe

Man Ray

When kids think Man Ray is a poisonous jellyfish, there clearly isn't enough art in our schools

Alphonse Mucha (1860 - 1939) Czech

Mucha was a brilliant draftsman, and his work personified the Art Nouveau movement.  Posters of lovely young females figures draped in Classical gowns, surrounded by birds, flowers, swirling patterns, shaped elegant hairdos.  He also mad sculpture, and later on, designed many postage stamps for the Czech Republic.  The flatness of his beauty is most arresting quality - or non-quality - since today we look at his work as mere posters, not high art.  That was the Art Nouveau movement.

La Dame Aux Camille (Sarah Bernhardt) 1896
Out of his many posters, I picked this one to convey the beauty of colors and flowers and approached to design, mixed with the tragic story we know as Camille.  She is a beautiful courtesan of 19th Paris who is dying of TB.  Sarah Berhardt played the role on stage, and was famous for it, in part because of this poster.
The actress is wearing an elegant dress, in profile.  She is surrounded by her Camilla, her white flowers, Mucha emphasizes her fragile beauty by putting her figure in a gilded frame of tiny stars. Around her head the pink color winds down and there is a hand holding a Camille plant at the bottom.  Theatre la Renaissance far at the bottom complete the poster.

JOB (1898)
The infamous JOB beauty scene a hundred times in "head shops" of the 1960's and 1970's. She is a poster beauty advertising JOB rolling papers.  JOB appears in large letters, and the lady holding the papers with fine brunet hair pulled up to give her a classical look, is in a circle of  flowery twists, and her body is in a seated, twist, holding the papers in one hand, and smoking or letting the smoke float from a lit rolled cigarette in a stylized drift. She is wearing a lilt orange dress and it pulls the viewers eye in to notice the JOB papers in her hands.  The lady looks on to the smoke with mild disinterest.

Perfume Bottles - Rene Lalique (1860 - 1945) French

In someways, Beardsley's broke through the different art movements of Sybolism and Art Nouveau with his strange obscessing for bondage and "perverted" sexual figures. Other members of the Art Nouveau movement took his flat lines and innovatedness and reinvintated it in their own style. Rene Lalique was at first a jewely designer. He used design elements and simiprecious stones rather than rubies or diamonds. The Art Nouveau swirls and female nudes were worked into his pieces.

His most famous work is perfume bottles. (L'Aire du Temp perfume by Nina Ricci still features frosted glass bird floating over the bottle of perfume.)

His earliest perfum bottles were the most beautiful, and collectable today. E'Elegance by D'Orsay, a perfume botttle designed by Lalique c. 1914. (today it is worth $4,700.00 in mint condition, signed by the artist.)

It is a very simple design of a square bottle and stopper made in frosted glass, shaped like a beehive. The bottle stands 5 1/2" tall, but it so exquistedly rendered, it's like jewelry for your dresser. You could set this piece down and have no other decorations.

The figures of two slender female forms, elegantly draped in gowns, swaying among flowers are in high relief. This is a piece where art and design meet - the premise of Art Nouveau - and remains timeless in it's astictic appeal.

Ouiatt Alexander Builski, c. 1927 is a perfume bottle also designed in dressed down elegance. The glass is clear and bell shaped, the screw on top is golden, and it looks like the shape is just approaching Art Deco - there are no vivid swirls or flowers, and the glass is very plain. It has the look of something stamped out of a mold, not hand crafted, There is a sun figure of aman with his whiskers rediating all around him as a sun burst. Lalique kept his designs simple and in harmorny. Many perfume bottle and jewelry pieces are inspired by him to this day.

Aubrey Beardsley, (1872 - 1898) English

A graphic artist who lived to only see 25, personified the shift from Symbolism to Art Nouveau. His work was complicated, erotic, decadent and he as an artist, was beloved of Salome, the infamous Biblical dancer of the 7 veils. However, he was strictly Art Nouveau in his rendering of flat drawings. He drew only in black and white, but the complexity of his lines shows him to be a great draftsman and artist, not simply a creepy pornographer.

Dream (1896) ink on paper
Dream show an elaborate chambermaid and her "uniform" outside a sheer curtained bed. She's poised in the left part of the scene, and the bed curtain makes a pointed edge, makes the patterned carpet, the only dark part of the picture, the only negative space. The chambermaid is wearing a short, 18th century puffed, flounced skirt, and fitted bodice, and a blouse of sheer dotted Swiss. She has on a fitted, beautiful mob cap. She is highly stylized, and it's uncertain if she's the Dream, creating the Dream or looking into the bed chambers to see the Dream. She has a faint feel of erotic bandage about her, wearing black boots, and carries a long baton twinkling at the top. She points into the bed chamber. This must be where the action begins.

The Dancer's Reward (1893) ink on paper
The perpetual femme fatal in the form of Salome, having danced her dance of the 7 veils, receives John the Baptist head on its silver platter. Just as she requested. She is both tender, loving and menacing as she looks down at the blood head where the tray is being held up by a stylized post, as if it were part of the surroundings. Salome grabs the Baptist by the hair, in one hand, and feel the dripping blood with her other hand. This is done with a sort of glee.
Salome in this picture is a vengeful Salome and she wears a dress like one designed by Paul Poiret (French Fashion Designer), an gown, but elegant. There are white lines that define the dress and a hanging scarf around her neck as counterpoint.
She has no problem with the blood and complications of killing of man in revenge for her own lust. The head of the Baptist is severed at the neck and the cry of his death throes are still on his mouth. Guess who won this sexual surrender?

Symbolism Continued . . . .

William Degoure de Nuncques (1867 - 1935) one of the most dreamiest of Symbolist Painters, was in real life a steady, ordinary man unlike his fellow painters obsessed with death, decadence, the love hate love of women, sexual ambiguity, and drugs.

The Angels of the Night (1894), oil on canvas, is a day dream in a night dream of winged angels meeting their secret darkness of the starlight, or in very early dawn, and kissing each other in a very sexy kiss, a loving, secret night tryst kind of kiss.  They others are flying around in each other's arms, swaying in the mist and light breeze.

The painting is remennessant of Henri Rousseau who painted much later, using similar themes.
Similar beauty, ethereal quality, and subtle sexuality that Rousseau was so famous for. 

The lines in the angel painting are sliced as a sidewalk cuts through to the vanishing point, and circled as in the small patches of grass as in the early spring, showing fragile flowers.  The coupled angles (there is one sole angel sitting dreamy like in the round with a garland.) has light on their faces and there is a true love valentine feel to their angel kisses.

Gustiv Klimt (1862 - 1918), continued

Hope I (1903) oil on canvas

Hope I shows a naked girl in profile in last stages of pregnancy .  She's ready to give birth any minute.  She has blue eyes and a straight on stare, as if she doesn't care what you, the viewer, thinks.  Her hair is a brilliant colour of red frizzy hair, she has ruby red nipples, white skin, an almost a deathly white, bushy red pubic hair, and skinny legs.  She not bothered by the skulls that hang around in the background.

The girl, or woman, stands in the fore front with pathos behind her - loopy lines, leering faces, swirling lines. Calling the painting Hope I, maybe Klimt was saying even in the death skull background, the pregnancy brings hope.  Although in 1903, it is shameless, decadent, showing an unwedded teenage mother, and she will probably be punished for having a child out of wedlock,  (showing off her big pregnant body). 

But the young woman doesn't seem to care at all.

Gustiv Klimt (1862 - 1918)

Life and Death (1908) oil on canvas

This painting might considered his masterpiece.  Very Symbolist in form, technique and subject matter: Death leering at Life.  Death is wide awake, and Life, with its intertwining figures of babies, nurturing mothers, men, are all asleep.

A mosaic of colors, the two images are clearly delineated.  There is a troubled feeling pervasive in his art work in most (or all ) of his pieces.  The reoccurring themes of decadence, Death always nearby, and woman of brutal sexuality - in this work of art, women lovingly embracing a baby; what the critics would call the out come of a woman's insatiable need for sex.

The background is a lurid painted green, and Death looks to Life with black crosses all over his form.  A form like a spectra.  He would be like today's Goth movement, and in a split second he can ruin everything.

But Life is merged together like a fond family in bright mosaic colors of greens, yellows, blues, reds.   It's an image like a crazy quilt and flatness but does not recognize the figure of Doom nearby, but sleeps to live life blissfully.

Klimt, and Austrian painter, was not beloved in his time.  He often showed explicit sex themes, skull themes, pregnant woman, lesbianism, masturbation (yet it was all very organized).  He underscored the decadent theme of Symbolism without apology.

Munch, continued

In keeping with the theme of the Femme Fatal, "Vampire" (1895), shows a long red haired woman, hair flowing, sinking her teeth into a male victim, against a dark background, her white arm wrapped around the man she's gnawing on, and has him in a head lock.  The man is resigned, maybe even turned on like some men are by women who suck blood out of them - he's curled up into her arms. 

Could it be an expression of erotic love, and how a woman has the upper hand in personal relationships? 

The familiar lines of Munch's, the wavy, curly, lines, the contrast of dark colors, and the woman's red hair - the Symbolist's loved red hair on women, it meant they were ever more lustful and crazy - covering up her bitten man are all traits of Munch's paintings.

To conclude the works of Munch, I was once dragging my self through the Art Institute of Chicago (where I live), pacing beyond the Renoirs, the Monets, etc. etc., and into another, more modern gallery, when I turned around and saw a Munch painting.  Pretty small, maybe a foot by a foot & 1/2, and it was the only painting taking my attention.  In spite of what Munch said about interiors, this painting was an empty interior, and the focal point was a large rectangular of yellow light coming from the window.  It was simple in form, but it screamed to be looked at, (but there was no one screaming in the painting).

Once in a great while that happens to you when you're in a museum.

Edvard Munch (1863-1944)

Edvard Munch (1863-1944} was a beloved Symbolist in the same way Baudelaire was a beloved poet of the Symbolist literary movement - (the suffer for art's sake, the poor starving artist).

"No longer should you paint interiors with men read, and women knitting. These must be human beings who breath life & feel & love & suffer."

This would sum up Munch's life, who often spent time in a sanatorium for nervous attacks.

"The Scream" (1893), oil on canvas, is a painting adored by many starving artists to this day. It sums up a lot people's life, even though it was painted over 100 years ago. The painting shows a distorted figure on a bridge suddenly consumed by an anxiety attack. The face is distorted into a head that is a scream its self, puffed up forehead, hands on either side of the face to show complete helplessness.

It is dusk, there are straight lines crossing through the painting and also the lines of wavy ness that reflect the unbalanced mind. The guards of the bridge seem to hold the scream in with its straight lines. The rest of the painting is famously wavy, into colors of dark and darker - outlined, orange and dark blues, they do not fade into each other. There are two shadowy black figures in the background of the bridge, and the bridge its self might even be thought of as the bridge from sanity to insanity.

The scream of the man looks like it might dislocate his head. "One evening I was walking a long a path . . . . I felt silk and ill . . . . the sun was setting and the clouds turning blood red. I sensed a scream pass through Nature. I seemed to me I heard this scream . . . . the color shrieked."
- Edvard Munch

Symbolism

Symbolism was an art movement of the late 19th century that repelled against the Iron Age - the Industrial Age - by moving back into time by dreams, myths, old poetry. It is an art movement directly opposite of Realism, and is the forerunner of Surrealism of the 20th century.

Symbolism combined a paramount of artists, from the French, the English, the Netherlands, the Austrian/Czech/German. Even an art artist like Toulouse-Latrec, normally grouped with the Post-Impressionists, could be considered a Symbolist because of his use of flat garish colors. "Flat" being the primary look of the paintings.

The painting colors lacked depth, yet were colorful and fanciful. Dark colors were employed, and woman portrayed not as simple elegant nudes, but Femme Fatales, witches, scary castrating ugly sexually hungry, predatory women. For the first time, I do believe, women are shown with distinct nipples in red color. This was a kind of revolution in itself.

Solome, the Biblical dancer of the 7 veils, is a favorite. Paintings show her with John the Baptist, his head on on it's infamous silver platter. Sometimes she is shown just dancing her evil dance. Her image is repeated over and over, carrying into the Art Nouveau movement which followed on the heels of the Symbolist moment.

This is the movement that began the "Art for Art's Sake", the Starving Artist, the bitter, unhappy artist, and suffering for your "Art" at any cost. These tendencies seeped into the art world, and never quite left them, as we embrace the image today.

Gone are the days of the Impressionists painting pretty women outdoors at a picnic.