Early Morning In Buffalo

In 1910 the Photo Secession group founded by Alfred Stieglitz organized an International Exhibition of Pictorial Photography at what was then called the Albright Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York. The careful selection of 600+ photographs was Stieglitz's bid for recognition of the medium as an art form.

Image: David Bonnar's Early Morning In Buffalo (1921) @ Project Gutenberg is reprinted from Pictorial Photographs of 1920.

An American Artist In Tokyo

AN AMERICAN ARTIST IN TOKYO
By Michiyo Morioka Seattle, WA, The Blakemore Foundation-University of Washington Press: 2007 709.2 MOR

Frances (Wismer) Blakemore (1906-1997) was born in Illinois, the daughter of German immigrants. Her mother had been an art teacher, her father ran a successful restaurant business. When George Wismer won eighty acres in a lottery, the family moved to Spokane, Washington. Frances worked her way through the university, so it took her ten years to earn her degree in art, but she also used the time to get commissions for commercial art work that led to her involvement in the Northwest Printmakers Association, gaining exposure for her art. After her graduation in 1935, France surprised her family for marrying a graduate student of literature, Glenn Baker. It was Glenn’s facility in languages that took them to Japan on a ‘honeymoon’ that lasted for five years.
The young couple lived in Tokyo, where the fashion-conscious Frances drank in the beauty of traditional Japanese textiles and ceramics, as well as continuing to explore new ways of print-making. Japanese bath was an elegant version of a traditional custom. Purse-Seiners is a cubist print of fisherman working with their nets, a style she had employed since her school days. The worsening tension between Japan and the United States led Frances to sail for Honolulu in July of 1940. She was still there when the Pearl Harbor attack took place.
During their years in Japan Frances had become fluent in Japanese and immersed herself in the culture. She had seen the political situation from the inside and was torn by her sympathy for the Japanese people, most especially for her close friends. She went to work for the Office of War Information as a result of all these experiences and her propaganda leaflets are not only artistically accomplished they reflect her respect and understanding of the consequences of war for ordinary citizens.
Eager to return to Japan when the war ended, the Blakes were exceptional candidates for the Army of Occupation. Frances was devastated to find that all her Japanese friends had disappeared without a trace. Her art work at the time illustrates the cultural clash: while Jeeper’s Japan attempts to educate the Americans about local customs and practices, it also shows the terrible toll taken on the Japanese people. When players seem a bit off key, They’re absorbing calories vicariously shows a night club scene where Americans dine and dance while the Japanese musicians are gaunt and pale. A sharp observer of the complex social relations between American personnel and their Japanese ‘hosts’, she portrayed awkward Americans encountering the impeccable manners of the Japanese.
Typist At Work is a picture of a second generation Japanese American woman who returned to work on the Allied reconstruction of the country. The cartouche in the upper left corner contains the word ‘Democracy’. The smokestack seen through the window is a sign of new industry,
After marrying her second husband, an American attorney, Thomas Blakemore, in Japan, Blakemore continued to experiment with the various trends in art. For many years then Blakemore was involved in a modern art gallery in Tokyo that became internationally respected. She returned to Seattle, due to her husband's’s ill health, spending her last decade there.

The Fearless Reader Art Gallery

It's a new feature, sort of. You may have noticed that, in recent months, art works with a connection to New York State have appeared here. Now, the complete art gallery is available at a click. Just look at any one of them and click on the ART GALLERY link at the bottom of the post...and all of them will appear, in the order they were posted.

Lake Champlain

The Frenchman Charles A. Lesueur (1778-1846) painted this watercolor of Lake Champlain on August 17, 1816, while traveling in the northeastern United Sates. Two decades before Alexis de Tocqueville, Lesueur crossed the Atlantic to see how things were going in the former French colony known as the Louisiana Purchase. The Album of Views of the United States from 1817 to 1836 includes scenes from many points up and down and around the greater Mississippi River basin.

Images from the collection of the Museum of Franco-American Cooperation, Blerancourt, France.

Turner To Cezanne: A Guide To The Impressionist Landscape

Turner to Cezanne: Masterpieces from the Davies Collection, National Museum of Wales will be on display from 9 October 2009 to 3 January 2010 at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York. This is the first of a series of articles relating to the art and artists in the exhibition.

A GUIDE TO THE IMPRESSIONIST LANDSCAPE: Day Trips from Paris to Sites of Great Nineteenth Century Paintings
By Patty Lurie Boston, Little, Brown and Company: 1990 758.144 LUR

It’s not easy to remember from this distance in time that the early French Impressionists were regarded as a bunch of lunatics, unable to paint a subject straight. Painting outdoors, painting quickly, painting the homely scenes of land, water, and sky before them, they produced works that affronted sensibilities accustomed to painstakingly worked visions of literary and historical allusion.
Author Patty Lurie’s inspired idea to follow the trail of these artists from the English Channel, up the Seine and along the Oise and the Loing Rivers, gives the book its organizing principle. Placing works of art next to photographs taken by the author and by Bertrand de Chasuvigny, what is more surprising than signs of modernity encroaching on beloved images is the verisimilitude that the Impressionists achieved with their fracturing of realist technique.
Alfred Sisley’s views of Marly, just northwest of Paris are those of one who lived there, familiar with the movement of light across buildings and down in streets through days and years. He juxtaposed warm and cool colors to admirable effect. Sad then, to realize that these works did not bring the artist commercial success.
For those who are only familiar with Pontoise through the works of Pissarro, Morisot, and Ceanne, it may come as a surprise that the town is a suburb of Paris. Thanks to the Impressionists, Pontoise lives in the imagination as a bucolic retreat saturated in greens. Pontoise was where Berthe Morisot moved away from the Barbizon style toward Impressionism. Next to arrive was Pissarro, who then persuaded Cezanne to visit. Where Morisot painted the light of early morning, Pissarro turned his back on the River Oise to focus on the hillside houses by the old road.
Argenteuil, Monet’s refuge from the Franco-Prussian War became the quintessential Impressionist town. The trains, boats, and bridges of Monet’s Argenteuil paintings hint at the industrial suburb that it became in the 20th century. Monet’s sweeping views of the Seine are now interrupted by office buildings in the distance.
Honfleur and Trouville on the Nomany coast are still the seaside resorts that they were in the 1870s and the ghosts of Monet and Eugene Boudin would not be lost for long if they could return. Lurie even managed to find s group of cows who appeared familiar with Boudin’s Seven Cows In A Meadow, Stormy Sky, c. 1881-1888.
For those fortunate enough to be able to use this volume as a travel guide, Lurie includes maps, directions and walking and transportation information.