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).  

Venus as mistress: Early Morning by Sir William Orpen

Early Morning (1922)

This is an affectionate portrait of Yvonne Aubicque, the mistress of its painter, Irish artist Sir William Orpen (1878-1931), who has several fascinating stories connected to her which we will examine in this post.  Called, Early Morning it is a wonderful evocation of the pleasures of a mistress, as she sits surrounded by domestic detrius that indicates no great desire to leave her bed anytime soon.

William Orpen

William Orpen was born in Dublin and attended the Metropolitan School of Art there to which he was admitted at the age of eleven, such was his natural skill. At the age of seventeen he moved to London to attend the  Slade School of Art.   Catching the attention of John Singer Sargent he rapidly became one of the country's top portrait painters.  Although he married and had three children he had a string of mistresses, many of whom modelled for him, despite constant worries about his unattractiveness (caused, it is said, by overhearing his parents asking themselves why he was so ugly and their other children so attractive!).  We will look at some of his other fine nudes another time but now we just want to concentrate on one of his model/mistresses, Yvonne Aubicque.

The Spy/The Refugee I (1918)

In 1916 Orpen was appointed as an official war artist and carried on in this role after the war where he was was the offical painter of the Versailles treaty signing.  While in France he fell head over heels for Yvonne Aubicque, the daughter of the Mayor of Lille.  He painted two portraits of her during the war but when he sent the paintings back to Britain he found himself in hot water, as official war artists were only supposed to paint pictures of military subjects. 

The Spy/The Refugee II (1917)

Even worse, he had called his pictures of her "The Spy" and claimed she was a German spy who had been executed by the French, no doubt in order to give it an acceptable "military" provenance.  However, the subject of female spies was sensitive at this period as English nurse Edith Cavell had been shot by the Germans for helping allied soldiers to escape and Mata Hari had also just been executed.  Orpen found himself facing a court martial and had to confess that the paintings were of his mistress. One of Orpen's friends was Lord Beaverbrook who was instrumental in preventing the court martial, although Orpen was severely reprimanded and only just hung on to his official war artist role.  Orpen changed the name of the pictures to The Refugee and, like his war paintings, they now belong to the Imperial War Museum in London.

The Beaverbrooke copy on the Antiques Roadshow

There is an interesting coda to this story.  Last year a man brought a picture along to the filming of the BBC show Antiques Roadshow, where members of the public bring along items and a panel of experts tell them about them.  It was a copy of Orpen's The Refugee I.  The owner had taken it to the Imperial War Musem who had said it was just a standard copy. He was not convinced, however, and was puzzled by the high quality of the picture and the fact it was signed Nepro Mailliw (William Orpen written backwards).  He discovered that in 1920 Orpen had gone back to France and painted another version of the painting for Lord Beaverbrook as a thank you for helping him escape a court martial.  The expert on the show confirmed that the picture was indeed a copy but was made by Orpen himself and was the long lost Beaverbrook version.  Much to the owner's shock, he valued it at £250,000.

Yvonne Aubicque in 1918

What happened to the lovely Yvonne?  She remained as Orpen's mistress for more than ten years; although he usually ran more than one simultaneously.  When in France, after the war, he had bought a black Rolls-Royce and hired a sixteen year old called William Grover as his chauffeur.  Grover was the son of an English father and a French mother but had been born in France. He immediately took a fancy to Yvonne and she him.  You might expect all sorts of problems to follow but when Yvonne stopped being Orpen's mistress he gave her his Rolls-Royce and a large house in Paris.  Grover and Yvonne married in 1929.  Grover had always been keen on cars and motorcycles and started to race motorcycles at the age of fifteen.  Worried about what his father might think he used the pseudonym W Williams when he started to race. By 1926 he had graduated to car racing.  In 1928 he won the French Grand Prix and in 1929, in a British Racing Green Bugatti, he won the inaugural Monaco Grand Prix.  Now known as Grover-Williams he retired from racing to concentrate on business, including working for Bugatti and running a kennel where Yvonne bred Highland Terriers which she successfully showed at Crufts dog show, eventually becoming a judge there. They were a wealthy couple and, apparently, good dancers, winning several competitions.

Grover Williams leading the 1929 Monaco Grand Prix

With the German invasion of France Grover-Williams fled to Britain where, because of his fluency in both French and English, he was recruited into the Special Operations Executive where he was trained at their wartime base, the home of Lord Montague, Beaulieu in Hampshire, now, ironically, the site of the National Motor Museum.  Grover-Williams was dropped into France, with no contacts or support on the ground, and was instructed to set up a new resistance network in Paris, as the previous one had been compromised. Yvonne moved back to Paris as well although she lived in their house in Rue Weber while he lived in a seperate apartment.  He recruited two former fellow racing drivers and they began sabotage work, principally at the Citroen factory.  In August 1943 Grover-Williams was captured by the Germans as their network had been compromised and it was believed that he was interrogated by the Gestapo and shot almost immediately.

However, in the 1990's a different story emerged.  It looked as if Grover-Williams survived and was taken to a prison camp in Poland.  It then appears that he joined MI6 after the war.  Even more strangely, in 1948 a man called George Tambal turned up at Yvonne's house in Evreux and moved in with her. She introduced him as her cousin but the locals thought they acted more like lovers.  He claimed to have arrived from America via Uganda, bringing animals for the depleted zoos of Europe. Grover-Williams, it should be noted, had family in America and a sister in Uganda. Also, amazingly, Tambal's date of birth was exactly the same as Grover-Willams. Tambal was very knowlegeable about motor cars and bore the scars of a beating around the head. 

No-one has ever proved it conclusively but it looks like Grover-Williams survived the war, joined MI6 (MI6 have admitted they know what happened to Grover-Willams but they won't say what) and then rejoined his wife in Evreux.  She died in 1973 and Tambal/Grover-Williams was killed in 1983, at the age of eighty, having been knocked off his bicycle by a car driven by a German tourist.

Elements of this remarkable story were used by Robert Ryan in his novel Early One Morning in which a fictionalised version of Yvonne Aubique appears as Eve Aubique.

Sir William Orpen died in Kensington 1931, possibly from complications arising from syphillis, and at the time was probably the most famous artist in Britain.

Showgirl Venuses 1: Folies Bergere by Alain Aslan

Agent Triple P appreciates a good showgirl, those be-sequinned, feather-plumed examples of statuesque loveliness that decorate the stages of Paris, Las Vegas and elsewhere, bringing glamour and style (as well as the ability to support often very big headresses) to brighten our lives.

What better way to start this series than with two examples by French artist Alain Aslan for the Folies Bergère.  This famous Parisian music hall was founded in 1869 with a design based on the Alhambra in London.  Unlike the Alhambra, which was demolished in 1936 to make way for the famous Odeon Leicester Square cinema, the Folies Bergère still exists and still puts on shows.

Its future, however, was not looking so bright back in 1974 when former Folies showgirl Hélène Martini took over the direction of the place and ensured its continuation to the present day.  The fact that these posters have Martini's name on them helps us to date them.  We believe that at least one, if not both, are from 1977.

Alain Aslan (b 1930) is probably France's greatest pin-up artist famous not only for his paintings for Lui and Oui magazines but also his sculptures of French national icons.  Currently living and working in Quebec, Canada, we will look at his work more extensively in the future.

One interesting conceit of these pictures is that whilst the feathers immediately say "Showgirl" they are, in fact, just an abstracted background design and not part of her costume.

Swedish Venuses by Ivar Kamke

 Eftermiddagsdopp (Afternoon dip)

Agent Triple P likes a strapping Swedish girl (one in particular!) perhaps because of his genetic origins and so we thought it would be a good idea to present a few solid Swedish beauties by Ivar Kamke.

 Women bathing in coastal lanscape (1914)

Kamke (1882-1936) was a Swedish painter and graphic artist but, other than that, we haven't been able to find out much about him.  There was a book published about him in Sweden in 1931 but that seems to have been it.

His paintings are very reminiscent of his slightly older contemporary compatriot Anders Zorn featuring, as they do, realistic and non-idealised nudes by the shore and in interiors.

 Den unge pige efter badet (1919)

Like Zorn he lived close to the water but whilst Zorn was based inland in Dalecarlia, with his featured shoreline being on Lake Siljin, Kamke spent a good portion of his active life in Storängen in Nacka, about three miles south east of the centre of Stockholm.  Whilst he had a lake nearby he was also close to the coast so his ladies by the water may have been salt water or fresh water nymphs.

 Nude models (1918)

Storängen, where Kamke lived with his wife Käthe, was an area where a lot of large villas had been built around the turn of the century.  The one Kamke lived in was designed by the famous Swedish architect Carl Westman, who designed Stockholm City Hall.  Today many of these villas survive in what is a very leafy and upmarket suburb of the city.

 Nude 1916

Apart from his nudes Kamke also painted portraits and landscapes and street scenes, especially of Dutch, North African and Italian subjects.  All his work demonstrates a wonderful sense of light and colour.

Unlike Zorn, whose paintings now sell for upwards of half a million dollars, you can still pick up a  Kamke for around €4000 which seems a bargain.  After all, who wouldn't want to surround themselves with lush Swedish bathing beauties?

Ivar Kamke

 

Thanks to Triple P's own Swedish bathing beauty, A, for her help with this post.

Written to the music of Lars Erk Larsen's Dagens Stunder and Symphony No 1.

Sleeping Venus: The Sleeping Beauty by Bernard Hall

 The Sleeping Beauty (1910)

Lindsay Bernard Hall (1859-1935) was born in Liverpool but found his greatest fame in Australia where the nudes in this post were painted.  Hall came from an affluent back ground and went to school at Kensington Grammar and Cheltenham College.  Although he was also very musical he decided to study art; enlisting for four years at the School of Design in Kensington.  There he studied under the French-trained Edward Poynter who emphasised nude studies as part of his training methods.

The Glass Bottle (1929)

Hall chose to travel to the continent as well to further his studies but rather than go to Paris he worked in Antwerp, where he developed an interest in graphics through studying with Charles Verlat, and in Munich where he studied under Professor Ludwig von Loefftz and Karl von Piloty.

Nude Reading at a Studio Fire (1928)

He returned to London in 1882 and the following year he had his first work accepted to the Royal Academy.  Apart from portraits and genre works he also produced a lot of black and white illustrations.  In 1891 he applied for the job of Director of the National Gallery of Victoria and Head of the Art School on the death of the previous director, George Frederick Folingsby who had also, co-incidentally studied under Piloty in Munich.  

Seated Nude by the Fire

He arrived in Melbourne early in 1892 and, not without initial controversy, set about sorting out the gallery's purchasing policy; buying major works by Turner,  Pissaro and Rodin on a trip back to Europe in 1905.

Despair or The Suicide (c. 1916)

Not surprisingly, given that they both studied under Piloty, Hall didn't change his predecessor's espousal of the Munich system, which involved working out from adark background and the judicious employment of silvery highlights.  These techniques are marvellously displayed in The Suicide.  One of its owners was so disturbed by the painting that he changed the name to Despair.  The artist left no clue as to the story behind the painting but it has been supposed that she is, perhaps, a high class courtesan overwhelmed despit the signs of obvious wealth on display, by her shameless lifestyle.  Whatever, unlike the other nudes in this post which are very much of the model in the studio type, this is a very sensuous and abandoned pose.

Bernard Hall in his studio

Hall married in 1894 but his wife died in childbirth in 1901.  He re-married in 1912 to a 27 year old nurse (he was 53 at the time) and they had another son and a daughter.  Although his roles at the gallery left him much less time for painting he continued to work on and exhibit, with the Victoria Arts Society, nudes, interiors and still life pictures.

The Sleeping Beauty is a conventional nude studio picture but Hall's handling of the model's body and the various fabrics on display is marvellous.  The darker background frames the girl's luminous body in a splendid example of Hall's Munich-influenced style.  This picture was sold for nearly $28,000 in 2005, which seems a bargain!

He died in London in 1935 during another buying trip for the Felton Bequest, set up by businessman Alfred Felton  who left half of his estate (£378,000 - an enormous sum in 1904) to purchase works for the National Gallery of Victoria.