Modern Art – Page 6 – Old Magazine Articles

About Paul Meltsner (Coronet Magazine, 1936)

To listen to Paul Meltsner one would think that it was fun to be a painter. Looking at his pictures one is compelled to conclude that life is a grim business of industrial strife, with factories shut down or picketed…

A wise-cracker and a wit at the cafe table, Mr. Meltsner is a proletarian artist when he works, and he works hard, he says. Which is what a proletarian artist should do… He exhibits frequently. He sells lithographs when he isn’t selling paintings and is represented in a number of museum collections.

Click here to read a Paul Meltsner review from ART DIGEST.

The Industrial Visions of Paul R. Meltsner (Art Digest, 1936)

The artist Paul R. Meltsner (1905 – 1966) was one of many WPA artists given to depicting sweaty, mal-nourished proletarians laboring in the fore-ground of smoke-plagued, industrial cityscapes and his work can be found today in the vaults of every major American museum. This is a 1936 art review covering his one-man show at the Midtown Galleries in New York:

Meltsner builds his pictures everyday scenes of industrial life, dedicating them to labor and the machine…He gets broad vitality in his forms and force in his compositions, relieving at the same time the usual drabness of such scenes by a tonic of color.

Another 1936 article about Paul Meltsner can be read here.

Madame X by John Singer Sargent (Vanity Fair, 1916)

In order to mark the New York arrival of Portrait of Madame X by John Singer Sargent (1856 – 1924), VANITY FAIR’s editors chose to run this anecdote concerning the 1884 creation of the work as well as a reproduction of one of the pencil studies for the profile head of the sitter, Madame Gauterau.

Dada at MOMA (Literary Digest, 1936)

An amusing, if blasphemous, art review of the Museum of Modern Art’s 1936 Dada and Surrealism exhibit.
The journalist oddly credited Joan Miro as the author of the Dada movement.

The Marx Brothers of the art world are displayed, in all their unrestrained glory, in an exhibition of Fantastic Art in New York this week.

An exhibition of this type is always easy prey for the practical joker. A similar show in Paris several years ago exhibited a shovel, submitted by a well-known but discontented artist as an example of perfect symmetry.

Click here to read about the contempt that the Nazis had for Modern Art.

The Water-Colors of John Marin (VanityFair, 1922)

When Fifth Avenue’s Montross Gallery launched an exhibit featuring over one hundred creations by the American painter John Marin (1870 – 1953) in the winter of 1922, art voyager and all-around well-respected critic Paul Rosenfeld (1890 – 1946) was present, and very shortly put pen to paper in order to heap many bon-mots upon the man and his work:

He applies his wash with the directness of impulse that is supposed to be discoverable only in the work of small children. One racks one’s brain for memory of a water-color painter who reveals in every stroke of his brush a more uninhibited urge outward.

The Art of the Insane Looks Like German Expressionism (Current Opinion, 1921)

The attached article is about a 1921 exhibition displaying the art of the mentally ill; it was organized under the direction of the psychiatric department of Heidelberg University. The exhibition made quite an impact on a number of modernists at the time and it is said that a few of the pieces from the show were later displayed in the 1938 Degenerate Art exhibit that the Nazis launched in an effort to discredit modernism.

Artist of the Ashcan School: John Sloan (Touchstone Magazine, 1919)

The editors of TOUCHSTONE MAGAZINE hired one of John Sloan‘s (1871-1951) groupies to interview him for one of their feature articles. It is an informative interview and there are a number of seldom seen sketches reproduced; the opening paragraphs give one a sense of what 1920s Greenwich Village was like at night, although one comes away feeling that the man could do no wrong. John Sloan’s friend, Robert Henri (1865-1929), when given the chance also failed to make any nasty comments about the painter.

Public Murals: the Art of the 1930s (Literary Digest, 1935)

A quick read on the subject of that uneasy union that existed between art and industry during the 1930s. References are made to the work of muralists Dunbar D. Beck (1902-1986), Arthur Watkins Crisp (1881 – 1974), Kenneth B. Loomis, Charles S. Dean and Charles Louis Goeller (1901 – 1955).

Modigliani in Paris (Gentry Magazine, 1955)

Modigliani came to Paris from Italy in the propitious year of 1906, start of a decade of art in which every contemporary movement germinated…When he became acquainted with Romanian sculptor Brancusi in 1909, the impact of the meeting gave his work a new direction…

Constantine Brancusi (Vanity Fair, 1916)

An appreciative five paragraph essay saluting the Modernist sculptor Constantine Brancusi (1876 – 1957), accompanied by one black and white image of the artist’s work, The Doves. Much of the review concerns the poor relationship Brancusi had with Auguste Rodin (1840 – 1917) who
had been his teacher in earlier days.