Venus by Frank Frazetta

Here is an atypical painting by America artist Frank Frazetta (1928-2010), better know for his genre-defining fantasy works.

The girl's sumptuous anatomy is less stylised than in his fantasy pictures whilst still being well towards the outrageous end of curviness.  She is rather too well made up and pin-up pretty to be an art nude and the pose is, we are loathe to say, rather awkward.  The delicate elfin face and well defined jaw-line does not really go with the Junoesque figure, either.  The picture does, however, carry an erotic charge, centered on that pale slice of haunch under her left thigh.

An interesting, rather than entirely successful, painting but descended from a distinctly classicist tradition: the colour palette could have come straight from John William Godward.

Venus from the rear: paintings by Steve Hanks

Mysteries suite (1997)

Steve Hanks (b. 1947) is a contemporary American painter specialising in photo-realist watercolours, of which his fine nudes make up a significant part of his output.

Shining in the sun

Although he is perfectly able to render a pretty face (and all of his girls are attractive) in many of his paintings his subjects are turned away from the viewer.  He argues that this means that the viewer of his work is not distracted by the features of the model and so focuses on the beautifully rendered bodies.

Coastline

It brings a mysterious and distant quality to his images and also introduces a sensual feeling of voyeurism into his nudes.

Born in San Diego in 1949 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in San Francisco and the California College of Arts and Crafts.

Morning bath

Hanks has a wonderful ability to capture the light and reflection on water, so occasionally we find his usually bed dwelling young ladies interacting with this element.  This one, Morning bath, has an almost Alma-Tadema quality about it.

The shower

Much of his interior-set work leans heavily on chiaroscuro, which he uses to great effect to model his sumptuous figures.

Waking up (2005)

His mastery of the watercolour medium has led to many awards and prizes in the US including the National Academy of Western Art Gold Medal

Daylight's comfort (2000)

His originals are starting to fetch good prices.  Daylight's comfort, a smaller (7x13 inches), looser watercolour sold in 2009 for $6,000.

In the light of morning (1996)

In the light of morning demonstrates his more polished photo-realist style.  The fact that this is a watercolour is truly astonishing.

We actually prefer his slightly looser paintings, such as the one above, as perhaps, some of his nudes are just a little too polished.

At the edge of shadow and light

Indeed, at the back of our mind, and it is probably more to do with our outlook than his, some of his nudes are  reminiscent in pose and lighting to those, equally voyeuristic in intent, nudes from Penthouse magazine in the late sixties.  The curvaceous forms of his models (no small busts here) adds to their pin-up quality.  However, he quite often finds his models by approaching them on the streets rather than using professionals.  No doubt it is easier to find young ladies with such splendid proportions in California.

Interior view (1995)

Hanks uses watercolour as a medium because after having used oil paints for fifteen years he developed an allergy to them.  He had to learn how to get the intensity of oil, particularly of skin tone, through layering watercolour; something he has achieved like no other artist we know of.

Seated Model (1990)

You can see the style develop from the more watercolor-like diffuse examples from the late eighties and early nineties to the richer colours of his style in the late nineties and beyond.

This is not to say that we don't like them; we do and would be happy to have one on our wall and not just because Hanks can paint a perfect posterior beautifully.

Contours

In fact, even more impressive, is is ability to model the complex contours of the back and shoulders.  The light on shoulder blades, dimples and, particularly, vertebrae is all perfectly done.

After the shower (1987)

Centered

Perhaps my favourite is this one, Centered, which has the cool palette, timelesssness and lighting of a Dutch seventeenth century interior.  

Comfort in solitude (2000)

Sunshine across the sheets

You can buy prints of Hank's wonderful paintings here.  More of his tremendous watercolours another time.

Steve Hanks

American Venuses by William McGregor Paxton

 Nude (1915)

Agent Triple P has recently returned from the splendid city of Boston, Massachusetts, where he had a particularly enjoyable time as a result of a positive concatenation of factors which included extraordinarily fine weather, a well located hotel and the presence of his particular friend S from Vancouver.  Boston has, of course, a long history (for North America, anyway) and a particularly fine artistic reputation.  We were pleased, therefore, to discover, in its extremely impressive Museum of Fine Arts, this lovely nude (top) by William McGregor Paxton (1869-1941).   American galleries being more visitor-focused than British ones (whose main concern seems to be protecting revenue from postcard and print sales) we were able to photograph the painting ourself (without flash, of course).

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts last week.  The current building was opened in 1909.

Paxton was born in Baltimore but when he was a young child his family moved to Newton Corner, now a suburb of Boston and only a dozen miles west of where the Museum of Fine Arts is situated.

Glow of Gold, Gleam of Pearl 1906

We had been aware of Paxton's art before through this effective full length figure painting from around ten years earlier. Paxton won a scholarship to Boston's Cowles Art School at the age of eighteen and two years later he continued his studies in Paris under Jean-Léon Gérôme at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. He returned to Boston in 1893 where he studied under Joseph DeCamp.  His first one man exhibition was in Boston in 1900 and he was an immediate success.

Seated Nude with Sculpture (1915)

Paxton married the Parisian classical style of the likes of Gérôme with the colourist accuracy of the impressionists.  Although we are only showing his nudes here he was best known as a portraitist and was much in demand for society and political portraits. He even declined a commission to paint Theodore Roosevelt as he was "too busy".

The Red Mules

He actually taught at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School from 1906 until 1913.  He sat on many juries of the most prominent exhibitions in the US and was a major figure in the American art world.  However the spectre of modernism haunted him as it did many classical painters at the time and eventually Paxton and others in his circle were forced out of the Museum of Fine Arts to be replaced by modernists.  He had seen Matisse's work in Paris but rejected modernism and continued to paint in the traditional representational way.  He died in 1941, whilst painting a picture of his wife, at the age of 72, largely forgotten and rejected by the art establishment.  

Nausicaa (1937)

Fortunately his work has been rehabilitated of late.  The picture we saw in Boston, at the top of this post, is an excellent example of the influence of Vermeer on his work.  Paxton had studied Vermeer's paintings and observed that only one small part was painted "in focus" the rest was deliberately blurred. In Nude (1915) only the woman's breast and right arm are painted sharply and draw the eye to the centre of the painting.

Paxton's handling of composition, colour and light was remarkable and these features are at the core of his paintings.  As one of his students, RH Ives Gammell (1893-1981) put it in his book The Boston Painters 1900-1930: "His unsurpassed visual acuity combined with great technical command enabled him to report his impressions with astounding veracity.  Of all the painters whose color perception had been sharpened by plein air study he was the most accurate draftsman and he never slackened his efforts to render both shape and color just as they appeared to the artist's eye.  Paxton opined that all painters, excepting Vermeer at the top of his form, permitted some tonality absent in nature to tinge their pictures.  He constantly pointed out that the invisible atmospheric envelope through which we look is limpid, 'like a glass of pure water' and he responded to that challenge.  His best indoor paintings are distinguished by an ambient lucidity we do not find to a like degree in the pictures of other men."  Gammell, himself a realist painter whose greatest work The Hound of Heaven was completed in 1956, was the last great American painter to be trained in the classical French tradition and so was an appropriate champion for Paxton and his Boston-based contemporaries (Joseph DeCamp, Edmund Tarbell and Frank Benson who are also covered in his book).  

Pin-up Venuses by J Frederick Smith

From Sappho The Art of Loving Women

Over on our Seduction of Venus blog we have just posted some photographs of girls kissing by J Frederick Smith.  These are from his book Sappho The Art of Loving Women (1975) which Agent Triple P acquired in one of those discount, remaindered book shops many years ago.  They weren't the first photographs we had seen of women interacting with each other erotically but they remain some of the most tender and romantic we have seen.

Interestingly, Smith turned to photography comparatively late in life and his early pictorial work was as an illustrator; becoming one of the top pin-up artists of the post-war period.  We can't think of another artist who moved on from illustration to becoming a top-class photographer in this way.  

Smith was born in Pasadena in 1917 and by the age of three had posed and drawn his first naked girl; who was also three.  As a teenager he won a three year Walt Disney scholarship to study fine art and design.  He moved to  Greenwich, Connecticut, in 1938 and opened his own studio doing freelance commercial work.   Even at this point he was including glamorous women in his advertising illustrations.

After a break for army service during World War 2 he returned to work as an illustrator, providing pictures for many magazine stories.   

It was his relationship with Esquire, however, that gave him the most recognition.  Esquire (founded in 1933) included Smith as one of the top pin up artists chosen to provide illustrations for their Gallery of Glamor series in 1946. 

Cleopatra

Baroness Mary Vetsera from the Mayerling tale

Mary Vetsera again.  We are not sure about the authenticity of her lingerie and, in reality, she had a rather podgy face not the sculpted beauty of Smith's version

Empress Theodora, wife of the Emperor Justinian (he of the dreaded Institutes)

He not only produced these pictures and the pin-up centrefolds for the magazine but often produced longer, themed pictorials illustrating, for example, famous women from history; all of whom seemed to be falling out of their clothes.

Springtime (1946)

Given the modest nature of Esquire's pin up girls (and Smith's were more modest than some of his contemporaries, such as Gil Elvgren) he nevertheless managed to get an erotic charge into them by revealing unexpected parts of his girls anatomy like these two effective upskirt pictures, which manage to make an erogenous zone out of the underneath of the girls' thighs.

His girls are very classic, they don't look particularly nineteen forties although his style changed over the decades and whilst he moved on to photography he carried on doing illustrations as well into the eighties.

Three from the 1947 Esquire Calendar

May from Esquire's 1948 calendar

Needless to say his illustrations soon started to appear in Esquire's famous calendars as well as the magazine itself.

In 1952 his agents, American Artists, signed a deal with the Chicago-based Brown & Bigelow Calendar firm.  Several Esquire artists teamed up to provide pictures for their 1953 ballyhoo calendar.  Smith provided three gouache paintings for this, two of which can be seen above.  We have to say that the girl with the record player is Agent Triple P's favourite of all those that appear here.

Smith was particularly good at pictures involving groups of figures, as we shall see in some of his illustrations for women's magazines in a future post, but these two examples of girls on the beach and changing demonstrate his eye for composition.

In the next few days we will look at some of his equally elegant photographs.