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01Oct 2022 by kike_K No Comments

Gunnar Widforss

Painting

Gunnar Widforss (1879-1934) was a Swedish artist who developed the well-known part of his paintwork in the United States. Proficient water-colourist, tireless traveller, he settled in California in 1921 and was entrusted painting a series of landscapes, he was asked to depict the National Park of Yosemite Valley first and then Yellowstone, which he travels long. Once there, he paints most of his watercolour and drawings, leading a lonely, adventurous life. He worked in many national American parks. The most complete and beautiful series of painting is the one devoted to the Grand Canyon, with spectacular rocky landscapes and changing or contrasted effects of light. There are a number of painters attracted to these places and nearly all of them much enjoyed the solitude and a way of painting surrounded…

The Small Tramps by Fernand Pelez

Painting

The French artist, of Spanish origin, Fernand Pelez (1843-1913) is little known. Another painter born in the 19th century one absolutely needs to re-discover; that’s why we advise to pay a visit to the Petit Palais in Paris. Influenced by the boldest realism, he devoted most of his works to tramps and under-privileged people (paying particular attention to children). We find today that both academicism and Pelez’s neat technique are against those pathetic characters, that sordid environment but we need to point out that at no time did he commit himself to sentimentalism like other painters such as Bouguereau. Some of Pelez’s paintings are unforgettable like the one with a young flower-seller, who sleeps completely exhausted on a step. The picture of the ‘petit misère’ begging in a doorway is…

De-humanization in Art

Books

The essay, written by José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) had been published in 1925. The first art movements had arisen and had changed for ever the Art world: cubism, dadaism, expressionism and surrealism; the first abstract Works. Ortega was not against all those Art avant-garde but was well aware that there was a gap among all this new art, most with an intellectual quality, compared to the tastes or the aesthetic needs of the common man. The average individual does not understand all that ‘intelligentsia’, mocks it or attacks it and, at the end, the average individual simply ignores it. That’s what he meant when he wrote about De-humanization in Art (he did not really write about the Art lacking humanity). Like in some of those books written by Ortega…