Charles M. Russell

Laugh Kills Lonesome, 1925, Mackay Collection, Helena, Montana

Some of my readers will be surprised to learn that I have a large oil reproduction of Laughing Kills Lonesome hanging in my office right along with my Marcel Duchamp and my German expressionists and my Georgia O’Keefe. It is just so middle America, so western-wannabe-a-cowboy fantasy straight out of a Holiday Inn lobby in Boise, Idaho. Where is the art?

Well, it’s right there.

Loops and Swift Horses are Surer than Lead, 1916, Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

Art comes in more than one form. There is the cutting edge, breathtaking intellectual art of a Picasso or Dali of Miro or Duchamp. But there is also the art that comes out of pure romanticism, out of childish delight and love, and that is every bit as artistic as the other, just different.

Charles Russell was a cowboy—an honest to God, dyed in the wool, work from get-on-to-get-off cowboy. And he absolutely adored his life. Adored it. And he went out of his way in some 2000 paintings to share it with us.

Buffalo Hunt

He lived in Montana for most of his life. He became an artist almost by accident. He could have been the darling of his age in polite society had he so chosen. Instead he preferred the people of his world, the west. He preferred a good rope and a cutting horse and a sky so huge and close it was like God about to bite you off the earth like a crisp of apple. He had no pretensions and no pie in the sky ambitions. He wanted us to know what it was like to live his life and the lives of others in the west; he felt priveleged and lucky to be able to share it with us.

Waiting and Mad, 1899, Indianapolis Museum of Art

He showed us people hard at work, and he showed us people letting their hair down. His paintings told stories. They were peopled with real friends and neighbors who felt honored to be in them. He admired and respected the Native Americans and painted what I believe to be the most loving, natural, and fun painting of an Indian woman in all of art.

He was a pistol, a humdinger, and a hatful of whoop-ass. He adored his life.

How about you, podnuh? Do you adore your life? Why the hell not? That, my friend—to live the life you most desire—that is the only art that really matters in the end.

The Herd Quitter

Aubrey Beardsley

The Platonic Lament (from Salome. Platonic was a code word of the period which meant “homosexual” to the informed. A soldier laments the death of his comrade.)

I wonder if a hundred years from now people will look back at the 1990’s and early oughts talking about the fin de siecle period of the twenty-first century and some explosion of the arts that we do not yet recognize because we are in the middle of it. I don’t see how. The turning of a century was once thought to bring its own special energy and daring. Certainly the emergence of the twentieth from the nineteenth was a breathtaking period in almost every field of endeavor. Just writing about it gives me that special skirl of energy and anticipation in the spine that you get just before an exotic trip or a new love—that lush, sensory cue that, if God truly does love us, He will let us ride on into the great mystery. I can feel that sensation  and follow it studying Beardsley’s pictures.

The Oriental Dancer

I imagine sitting down on some random point in any of his lines, then riding it like a roller coaster ‘til it carries me to every part of his drawing. It is a breathless ride that twists and twirls through every surprising place.  A great many artists have taken that same ride; Beardsley’s shadow looms large in the work of Edward Gorey and Gahan Wilson. His severe black and white tableau are the epitome of art nouveau flamboyance tempered by an academic English restraint. Which is not to say Beardsley didn’t let himself go. His illustrations for Lysistrata are so completely rude they would probably draw protests today. But the monstrously large genitalia of these illustrations make them about as prurient as a photo of a pine cone. They are less salacious than they are intellectually impertinent.

Despite his friendship with Oscar Wilde and his welcome within his inner circle, it is likely that Beardsley had little if any sexual experience.  The pictures of Salome that he did for his friend’s play betray far better the likely hunger in his heart for a sexual life. His Salome is dangerous, indeed, in every way that matters.

from Le Morte d’Arthur

At the end of his life he coverted to Catholicism and regretted what he now saw as his wicked art. He begged his representatives to destroy his “…bad pictures” so they could not be seen again. His agent lied through his teeth and assured Beardsley that he would handle it. His works survived to influence vitually all of illustrative art right down to the present day, just as Beardsley himself had once been influenced by the posters of Lautrec. All artists stand on the shoulders of the artists that have come before. Maybe that’s why so much modern art seems moribund. Maybe all the modern artists are feeling scrunched with so many giants beneath them. Maybe we should raise the ceiling.

The Powder Tassel

They tell us that in this new age everything is so much faster. Our technology ensures that we make an impact on society in the shortest possible time. Maybe so. Beardsley died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five. John Keats also died at twenty-five. Seems pretty fast to me.

from The Black Cat, Tales of Edgar Allen Poe

Interlude 8, I Am A Nighthawk

When the jazz club shuts her down we come here to let the buzz bleed out from our ears with a pot or two of joe and a club sandwich. At first the place is jumping and the guy behind the counter spins like Rumi’s second cousin trying to serve everyone at once but the atmosphere is still alive and full of the good feeling from Birdland down the street or wherever.

I should point out this is the white place for afters, the colored one is a couple blocks away. That’s where the cats are, of course, they can’t get served in here, but man were they ever hot, those guys. Wailing, and the notes went across the room and swirled in the air like razor wire, slashed up our backs like a bull whip, and then, before we could even catch our breath, it was last call and closed by 3am. Quittin’ time.

I’s the foreman. I’s the one says when it’s quittin’ time.

Quittin’ time.

So now it’s late thirty and the buzz bleeds from behind my eyeballs and the counterman leans forward and says, “Shouldn’t you be moving on?”

And I say, no, man. I need another cup or two before I navigate the road, you know? Big night on the town.

He taps my hand and says, “You’re getting a little dark, my friend. Maybe you should move along.”

But I look the same I’ve always looked and I’m getting a little annoyed. There’s a harsh frown on the counter guy and the couple across the diner stare at me with disapproving scowls.

I’m an American, I tell ‘em. And they shoot me this look.

“Are you?” That’s what their eyes say, plain as day. “Are you?”

The counterman leans in and I can tell he wants to be kind but it bothers him to get too close.

“You aren’t in the club you think you’re in. Not really.”

I look at the couple, and something in their eyes deflates me. Suddenly, I’m not so sure of myself.  I’m asking, are you—are you in that club?

The woman nods and the counterman says,  “They see more colors than you do. They see the world another way. You just don’t understand. You have to trust them. From out there.” He nods his head at the street.

“We’ll let you come in later,” says the woman. “Maybe. When we need something.”

Sad and a little scared I go to the door. I look back.

I thought I could be like you…

The woman shakes her head. “Never. You could never touch me or sit with me or do anything other than listen to me. I am not for you, not ever. No one you know has ever known me. You think they have, but then, you don’t think very well. Ask yourself, out of all the people you know, and all the people they know, who among all of you has ever touched my hand, has ever kissed my lips? Now go outside and wait until we need you and when you look back this way close your eyes.”

So I am in the street. All the buzz has long since bled from out of my ears.  They must still be in there, but I cannot see them through the glass because my eyes are closed.

L. S. Lowry

V.E. Day Celebration

 

Lowry is an artist who doesn’t seem to be very well known in the United States, but in the United Kingdom he is practically a household word. Many people encountering his work for the first time take him to be a folk artist, but in fact he studied art seriously for years, and the style on which he settled and for which he is best known came from a conscious artistic urge. In UK art circles the mention of “Matchstick Men” is pretty much reserved for Lowry, and although he painted just about every kind of scene over the years, he is remembered primarily for street and industrial scenes.

 

 

He is an odd mixture of closed artist and gregarious friend. Much is made of his supposed loneliness; he never married and is noted to have said at the age of 88 that he “had never known a woman.” However, he was also known to be a prodigious liar, not for self-aggrandizement or to deceive, but rather in an old fashioned, tall tale sense of fun. His friendships were, in fact, many and he socialized freely with the people who mattered to him. But he did not care for strangers, and he could not stand fans. He supposedly kept a packed suitcase at his front door so that should some stranger pop by unannounced, he could pretend to be on his way to the train station. (Caution: this may also be one of his lies. Ain’t art history fun?)

 

The Cripples

 

He worked until retirement primarily as a rent collector, but enjoyed considerable success as an artist in his lifetime. By the time of his death in 1976 he could look back in satisfaction on a career that was well received by both the general public and the artistic elite. He enjoyed that enviable position of having nothing much to prove to anyone at all.

 

A Procession

 

A large print of the painting, A Procession, hangs on my living room wall. The parade in the background is in support of union action, whether organizing or striking, I do not know. Part of the charm of his work is how often you can discover pieces of political commentary hiding in unlikely places. In our modern time of slash and burn rhetoric it is easy to forget that there are subtle ways to get a point across as well. Equally, Lowry was not afraid to be blunt. That old folk saying, “Don’t piss on my boot and try to tell me it’s a rainstorm” is just another way of saying stop focusing on the label and pay attention to the thing itself.

And watch out for liars.

 

A City’s Pride

Sandro Boticelli

Birth of Venus, 1486, oil on canvas, 278.5 x 172.5cm, Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy

If you know nothing whatsoever about art, it remains a safe bet that you know at least three works by sight. Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa would certainly be one, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling would be another, and Boticelli’s Venus would be the third. (The Last Supper and the statue of David could also be included on this list but that would spoil the elegance of my argument, so I won’t mention them.) All three of these artists flourished at about the same time and in the same place, creating a resonance of beauty and intellect and meticulous artistry that radiated from Florence, Italy so brightly it blinded the whole world for centuries after.

Primavera, 1477, tempera on wood, 203 x 314cm, Uffizi

We don’t really know all that much about Boticelli personally, which leads me to believe he was likely a rather timid soul completely different from the enormous personalities of his titanic contemporaries. He never married, but was believed to suffer love for a married woman whom he took as the ideal for his Venus. She died while still young, and it was Boticelli’s wish that he be buried at her feet. Despite the odd impertinence of this request, her family consented and when he died many years later, he got his desire to rest forever ‘neath her corns. The privilege of greatness, I suppose. He was also believed to “keep a boy” but then, who doesn’t?

Adoration of the Magi, 1475, tempera on panel, 107.5 x 173cm, Uffizi

Much of his work remains in various chapels and churches, but to me his work for the Church is the least interesting. He became, eventually, a follower of Savonarola (as did a great many Florentines) and was thought for many years to have destroyed many of his pagan-themed paintings in a Bonfire of the Vanieties. If this is true, then we can only guess at what we have lost yet again to religious zeal. On the other hand, we are lucky to have had him at all.

Pallas and the Centaur, 1482, tempera on convas, 207 x 148cm, Uffizi

Boticelli was funded, both directly and indirectly, by Lorenzo de’ Medici, as were da Vinci and Michelangelo and almost all of the great Renaissance painters and sculptors and writers and composers and actors and hookers and bartenders and barrel racing cowgirls. (These fifteenth century folk were a very naive people—proto-humans really— who believed in a tired principle called noblesse oblige. You might have trouble looking it up. I don’t think it exists anymore except in the PR sense.) De’Medici’s generosity did not arise solely from his good nature; this was not some milk-sop scion of a great man, but a stern and mighty force in his own right. Rather, his patronage reflected his sense of place, which in turn sprang  from the pride and love he held for his own people. He believed that by giving people the means to live and create and then getting out of their way they will do something to enrich their community.

He was wrong, of course, and the best the Florentines managed to do was to change the whole world.

The whole world.

We have been trying to live up to that level of artistry and patronage ever since. So we’re a little more self-centered now, a little greedier…so what? We have worlds inside us, don’t we? Isn’t that what the cool kids tell us? No worries, mate. Just be patient. You’ll get yours, too.

 

 

Tamara de Limpica

Self Portrait in the Green Bugatti

I am a sucker for a lot of different things. I love the expressionists, the cubists, the surrealists, art deco, art nouveau, impressionism. Goodness, I guess I like almost everybody except whoever is creating art right now. It is probably cliche to notice how common it is to look backward and admire everything only to look around you and be disgusted. I suspect that says more about our personal sense of satisfaction and fulfilment than it does about the art we presume to judge, but maybe not.

Portrait of the Marquis d’Afflito, 1925

Here is an artist who is easy to like and easy to write about. What a life! Hers is the kind of flawed and debauched brilliance that novelists try and fail to capture.  There isn’t nearly room enough in this blog to cover a tenth of her wise, cold, and scandalous nature so instead I encourage you to look her up.

Portrait of Mrs. Allan Bott, 1930

What I do want to think about is how modern these pictures appear; for all their Art Deco feel they seem designed by computer. It is quite a startling effect. The other amazing thing is how thoroughly flattering her paintings are. It must have been wonderful and terrible to have her paint your portrait, knowing you could never live up to it but aching, all the same, to see yourself grandly romanticized.

Portrait of Doctor Boucard, 1928

de Limpica was beautiful, talented and smart. She foresaw and planned against the coming Nazi horrors long before most, and I think she took a cold and calculated approach to her painting as well. She decided early on that to really make money as a fine artist it was best to concentrate on portraits. Be as aristocratic as you like, but you still need to keep the lights on and nobody is better at funding the lights than the vain, successful,  and rich.

She works as an object lesson for artists who whine about having to sell out to get ahead. If you are familiar with art, and you come across one of her canvases anywhere under any conditions, chances are you will say, “Ah, that’s Tamara de Limpicka, or at least, that’s her style.” Her style. No one else’s.

That’s not selling out; that’s writing your name across the sky.

Girl with the Green Gloves, 1930

Grant Wood

American Gothic, 1930, Oil on board, 62.4 x 74.3cm, the Art Institute of Chicago

Is there a more iconic image in American art? I think not. America’s love for and fascination with this image has endured since it first won its $300 prize back in 1930. Wood always insisted it is an ordinary picture of a farmer and his spinster daughter outside the front of their home. The pitchfork symbolizes a simple work ethic. The title comes from the gabled window which seems strangely elaborate in such a plain home. The house was real, and there is a famous sketch from Wood of the house alone. Wood used his dentist and his sister for models. The picture became a sensation almost right away, and speculation ran wild as to its meaning. Most critics and deep thinkers found it to be satirical and judgmental of the American rural lifestyle, and found all sorts of sub-texts which reportedly drove Wood crazy. It is easy looking back to imagine that this was a case of the “experts” showing off their ignorance in the face of an artist’s honest dismay. But…

Artists are ultimately responsible for their art. Every artist is conscious—both during creation and after—that a given piece lives and works on many different levels, or at least it should. Without that complexity, without that promise of “discovery” then you have little beyond a deft image and a paycheck. Wood was far better than “average” and in my opinion this isn’t even his best work. But this is where the story is. And he damned well knew it. The word “gothic” evokes more than a fillip of architectural style thrown at a farmhouse; it carries extra weight from its connotations of darkness and secrets. A gothic story hints of evil and monsters and men and women who are twisted by their circumstances. It is melodrama writ large and is phony besides, relying as it does on childish manipulative technique and bathos, its images stereotypical and empty. Wood had to know the feelings symbols like pitchforks stir in the public’s imagination. He had to smile privately at the implications of her face, the gaze that looks away toward something beyond her, something she cannot have. I see her face and imagine that her bottom lip is about to tremble.  There is no insight into the man at all. He is closed as a box. He is rigid and straight as the fork’s tine that runs in parallel with the material of his coat. It is a picture that seems to insist on a puritan American image even as it mocks that notion as patronizing and untrue. For better or worse, it will be with us Americans—and will label us—forever.

Death on the Ridge Road, 1935

For all American Gothic is the piece he is known for, this is the work I prefer. Anyone who wants to send me a print of this is welcome to do so. I find it stunning. Here, too, is a story and it is a common one, but we are made to write it in an instant from this image. The painting seems pushed into our face. The colors are unnatural, almost CGI in their impact. People are creating this kind of thing now on computers and being hailed for their visual artistry. Wood was doing this in oils in the thirties. Not bad for some corn-hick from Iowa.

January, 1940, 67 x 82.5cm, Cleveland Museum of Art

Here is a deceptively plain picture of haystacks in snow that I could happily look at every day for the rest of my life. Again, there is an almost digital quality to this image.

Grant Wood was an artist of great style and polished visual taste. He is worth a careful look. His work is classified as “regionalism” which could mean any damned thing, but so far as I am concerned it transcends region altogether.

And time as well.

The Painting on the Fireplace

Gordon Conway

Concept Illustration for 1930 production of Wonder Bar

For all the advancements we’ve made in technology, for all that even our most simple modern pursuits would be unimaginable to past generations, we somehow have managed to become more socially stodgy than ever. We actually have lawmakers insisting that the word “vagina” not be used in the very chambers where the vaginally-challenged male membership (Hah! He said member!) are pushing legislation to whip these genitalia into shape.

I should mention here for the benefit of my readers outside the USA that in this country women outnumber men by a considerable margin, but for some reason never seem willing to take over through the vote and fix some of this foolishness. If I may be permitted a political moment I would like it very much if the ladies of America would “Mom up” and take over for a while. These guys are nitwits.

Anyway, it would be fun to imagine what the modern American male would make of someone like Gordon Conway. This woman essentially left Dallas, Texas in 1915 (when it was even more troglodicious than it is now) and showed up at the offices of Vanity Fair to announce that she was the shit, and where was her office, please? She was twenty years old. Twenty. And she was right.

Gordon Conway was the shit.

It is ridiculous that more of this woman’s work cannot be found to share with you here. I recommend that you seek out the book, Gordon Conway, Fashioning A New Woman by the rather wonderful Raye Virginia Allen. It is one of the few places you can see a wide selection of her drawings, ads, and costume designs.

Over a twenty-two year career she created about 5,000 finished drawings almost all of them published in ads or for article illustrations; she did the costume designs for over a hundred stage shows, and worked as costumer for some 47 movies. She even tried her hand at acting in some of the pictures. She traveled widely and enjoyed the fruits of her reputation for glamour, smarts, and experience. While it would be too much to suggest that she created the flapper look in the 20s all by herself, there is little doubt that her take on art deco design had a tremendous influence on the look we all associate with the Roaring Twenties. By the time feminist writers like Lois Long came around to bestow their cheeky reportage on the nightlife and fashion of the day in magazines like the New Yorker, Conway had already been on the job some ten years.

And what would she have had to say to these pseudo-avuncular, hairy-nosed twits in today’s corridors of power? Not much. She didn’t waste time on boys pretending to be men.

André Derain

Estaque, 1905, oil on canvas, private collection

What does the artist owe the world beyond his art?

This morning’s news discusses Tom Cruise’s “high speed chase” in New York City (Mind boggling speeds of up to 55 miles an hour in a 35mph zone in a Suburban driven by a professional driver—Oh my lordy, how will the world survive?) Cruise was trying to get away from the paparazzi who are plaguing his child right now. Tom Cruise is a very famous man who makes an insane amount of money. People want to know all about him. His daughter is of interest because Mommy and Daddy are getting a divorce. According to reports as of this writing, some ten cars were in on this chase along with several motorbikes and bicycles. (High speed bicycles, no doubt.) So Cruise, who is trying to protect his six year old daughter from all this attention in the middle of what is undoubtedly the most trying time in her life so far, is now chum for the sharking heads of television who wonder if maybe he is an irresponsible dad. Really?

Figures from a carnival, 1906, watercolor, 43.1 x 60.3cm, private collection

We should give the man a high powered rifle and allow him to take a few potshots at these shutter-bugs just to keep them honest. It would help society two ways, both by eliminating his need to speed (he’d probably go ahead and park so as to have a more stable gun rest) and by cutting the herd of these villainous, vile, vulturine TMZ turds.

But I’m not judging here; I’m just curious. Maybe Tom owes it to us to suck it up.

André Derain had some problems, too. He started out well enough. He was the third leg of the fauvism movement along with Vlaminck and Matisse, and he was an interesting painter because he experimented with many styles. In Matisse you can see a gradual movement within a few styles over a great many years, but Derain seemed to be in a hurry to master every style while he was young and full of power.  His gifts were so prodigious that almost all these paintings are wonderful to study. Nevertheless, you cannot help but think as you go through his works, here is Picasso and here is Matisse and here is Rousseau and here is Cezanne and on and on through the greats of art. He never seemed to find a single style that was absolutely his own which is a shame for such a great artist, and a real challenge for art poseurs like me who pretend to be able to glance at a work and pretty much tell who did it.

Damn you, Derain!

Still Life with pumpkin, 1939, oil on canvas, 92 x 71cm

But what does he owe us? In our modern, hyper-connected time we see an almost daily instance of some celebrity or authority figure cowering in the face of an avalanche of angry tweets over some perceived misstep on the path of eternal internet righteousness. Do you know how hard it is to write things that are in no way contentious? And while we are at it, do you know how incredibly boring and hollow such things are to read?

Banks of Seine, 1905, oil on canvas 85 x 95cm

There was no Twitter in Derain’s day, and had there been, he likely would have failed miserably. Derain allowed himself to be lionized by the German occupiers of France. I am not among those who blame him for this. The German’s had proven themselves to be incomparably brutal by this point of the war, and people are going to do what they have to do to survive. But despite similar pressures artists like Picasso managed to exist without entertaining German officers and officials at their homes, or at their studios, and they managed to avoid lending their imprimatur to the occupiers. Derain, instead, went along willingly. He and several lesser known artists allowed themselves to be guests of honor in Berlin at a Nazi sponsored exhibition of art. Derain may well have thought it an innocent act. He was an artist, not a resistance fighter. You go along to get along and trust that your public will forgive you.

Ball of soldiers in Suresnes, 1903, oil on canvas, Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, Missouri, USA

But, of course, the public doesn’t forgive. Ever. He was marked by many as a collaborator and that was enough to tarnish his reputation. It is a terrible thing to be talented, famous, and weak.

But of course, almost everybody is.

Tom Cruise endangering his daughter

Édouard Vuillard II

The Family After the Meal or The Green Diner, 1891, Oil on Canvas, 34 x 49.5cm, Private Collection

I often find myself coming back to visit this artist. Way back when I wrote the first piece on Vuillard I was still fumbling with how to approach the blog. I had not learned how to go find the better prints of things so that the pictures could be better studied. I relied on a few book plates which, frankly, weren’t very good. Today, with the tools provided by the Google Art Project and with lovely sites like Olga’s Gallery it is much easier to find good representations of artists from this period.

Vuillard was one of Les Nabis, which means “the prophets” in both Arabic and Hebrew.  In terms of PR they were a pitiful group in that most folks didn’t even know they had formed until they were nearly broken up. In the case of Vuillard, it would have been no real stretch to imagine much of his work fitting in quite naturally with some of the better known, later movements like the Fauvists.  Note the breathtaking freedom of color and composition in the Boulevard of Batignolles, following.

The Boulevard of Batignolles, c. 1910, oil on paper, 78 x 96cm, Lower Saxony State Museum and Art Gallery, Hannover, Germany

But the real fact is that he seemed to be at home in a great many styles over the course of his life. Here is a case in point from 1935.

Jeanne Lanvin, c.1935, 124.5 x 135.5cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris

The more I study him the more I respect him. He really had an uncanny way of rendering character and story. He is the kind of artist that makes the job of writing easy, for his work invariably sets your mind to buzzing. Just as you cannot help but know the characters in the Green Diner, above, complete with all those familiar family dynamics which ring so truly and conjure so many tales of play and conflict round the roast, so too, must you wonder at the mysterious woman in the picture which follows, who is turning away to hide her face. Her posture is not the posture of one who is frightened but rather suggests someone who is fighting to keep herself together. The question for us isn’t how the colors are used or how to define the composition of form or figure, but rather how does he communicate so thoroughly with so little? More and more, this is what I seek in art: not the glibness of the over-told, shiny, glittery, formulaic, mechanistic, empty bilge that pretends to sensitivity, but rather the playful implications of a canted, cat-like head at the dinner table or the implied struggle in an averted gaze, the lonely despair in a teacup centered just so, the suggestion of a complete and complex life in the rendering of a single, perfect moment.

Young Woman in a Room, 1892-93, oil on cardboard, Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia

But do I give him too much credit? Isn’t this what enthusiasts do? We tend to overstate our case. Is there really so much difference between this guy and the next guy? It’s just a club, isn’t it? Everybody gets together whithin their little geeky niche and decides on behalf of the eloi who is good and who is bad. Isn’t that the real truth? Perhaps it is a little bit. Lord knows there are many cases of critical love that I simply do not understand, but you will never hear about them from me. I do not have time to waste denigrating someone’s work that others may love.

Life, people. Can you throw a life down in two dimensions? That will always be the highest bar. Our tastes may  differ on who does or does not meet that criterion, but I think most of us agree that art which lives, art which has—like the old Bugles commercial says—love, truth, beauty, corn, and a little salt, that’s the stuff that hangs on God’s walls.

Does Vuillard meet this standard? Here is a piece of his that probably took him less time than it takes the Starbucks guy to make your  coffee. Is this lady alive? I don’t know, but she takes my breath away.

Half Length Figure of a Seated Woman, 1911, black and red chalk, scratch marks, 15 x 10cm, Vienna