In this occasional series, Fine Art Today delves into the world of portraiture, highlighting historical and contemporary examples of superb quality and skill. This week we discuss an American icon’s portrait by Norman Rockwell.

A fixture on television and radio for decades, English-born entertainer Bob Hope (1903-2003) enjoyed a level of success and popularity few have replicated. Hope earned widespread appeal during the 1940s when he moved from New York City to Hollywood. From 1941 onward, Hope was committed to entertaining U.S. troops, and he continued to do so through the Persian Gulf War — making him “legendary,” in the words of the National Portrait Gallery.

In 1954, Hope was set to grace the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, thereby crossing paths with its head artist, Norman Rockwell, an American icon himself. That was February 13, 1954. “Three days later,” the museum reports, “Rockwell presented Hope with the original painting on his television program, The Bob Hope Show.

The portrait is a perfect construction of the entertainer’s personality — handsome, intelligent, and a little quirky. Hope faces toward the viewer’s right and gazes at us with raised eyebrows and a mischievous smirk. In Rockwell’s typical style, Hope is set against a white background, his head the only part of the bust-length portrayal fully realized. The presentation, like many other Rockwell paintings, forces the viewer to confront the subject directly, without distraction — an attention that Hope himself was undoubtedly accustomed to. Hope wears a blue and green striped tie, and details around his visage reveal splashes of cool tones, unifying the overall portrait.

To learn more, visit the National Portrait Gallery.

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On Saturday, May 20, 2017, Arcadia Contemporary, a leader in realist works now located on the West Coast, opened a brave new exhibition of fresh works by well-known artist Casey Baugh. Due to the scale of some of the works, Arcadia Contemporary President and Curator Steve Diamant rented the Noh/Wave Exhibition space in downtown Los Angeles for the opening night so viewers could enjoy the larger-scale works in their full capacity.

By Vanessa Françoise Rothe

Mixing sublime realism with modern strokes, Casey’s works deliver a unique viewing experience. From afar, they are quite realist — so detailed that they can be appreciated as traditional or classical fine works. But as one draws near, one discovers tactile nuances, splashes even, layers of dripping paint, and beautiful hard and soft, almost airbrushed edges.

The classically trained Baugh’s drawing skills are sharp, so the figure, or a single hand, is rendered with a combination of tight edges and values to show the form, and often a soft, “airbrushed” side is added to help create depth and interest. His purposeful spills create movement, and the thicker/thinner brushwork adds to the depth of the works to make them enjoyable on many levels. This winning combination is clever, combining a clearly classical realist style with modern-day flair.

Baugh has been revered for years for charcoal figure and portrait drawings boasting this combination of realism and abstraction, filling many of his workshops with artists who admire and try to emulate his effects. It seems with this bold new exhibition he has taken these unique effects and applied them to his oil paintings as well. Naturally, the effect on the viewers has also been positive.

Diamant notes about the subjects of this year’s exhibition: “This new series of paintings and charcoal drawings relates to Casey’s desire to celebrate the female form in nature. To show both the expansiveness of the locations and the intimacy of the figure all in one image.  Baugh added, “I really felt the larger size of the works allowed me to be free with paint application and I was able to experiment more with the layers of paint, creating volume and interesting textures in the works. It was amazing to be able to be so free and expressive with the paint at this scale. I was especially pleased to see friends and collectors
be able to view the works from a far and up close at this scale, so they could experience them in same manner as I had created them.”

The exciting event was well attended, and the classical violin and cello — which had a modern twist of new sounds beyond the traditional as well — seemed to echo the surrounding artwork.

Baugh’s new collection of oils and charcoal works for “Exposed” can be viewed at Arcadia Contemporary through June 8.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

Administrators with the Frick Collection are heading an international collaboration to unlock access to 25 million images of artworks for the public.

If the Frick Collection — along with other multinational organizations — have their way, the public will soon have consolidated online access to more than 25 million images of artworks. Administrators are touting the move as transformative for art historical research, “enabling scholars and the public to study never-before-published photo archives from around the world.”

Along with the Frick, 13 other institutions have hopped on board, and they’re calling themselves the PHAROS Art Research Consortium. “Led by Inge Reist, director of the Frick’s Center for the History of Collecting and president of the international consortium, this long-term initiative will bring together photo-archive materials relating to more than 25 million works of art,” according to the group’s press materials. “These collections of images are also rich in previously unpublished related art historical documentation. Seven million images from the original partners are expected to be digitized and available by 2020, with future timelines for the group to be developed. Eventually, PHAROS will expand to include records from additional photo-archives world-wide.”

Current partners accessible at PHAROS include the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Rome), Bildarchiv Foto (Marburg, Germany), Courtauld Institute (London), Fondazione Federico Zeri (Bologna), Getty Research Institute (Los Angeles), I Tatti (Florence), Institut national d’histoire de l’art (Paris), Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), Paul Mellon Centre (London), RKD-Netherlands Institute for Art History (The Hague), Warburg Institute (London), Yale Center for British Art (New Haven), and the Frick Art Reference Library (New York).

Learn more by visiting PHAROS.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.

For the second season running, a painting by Norman Rockwell commanded the top price during American Art week at Sotheby’s New York. Which of the artist’s iconic artworks stole the show?

Norman Rockwell’s “Two Plumbers,” painted in 1951, is a sparkling example of the artist’s unrivaled ability to depict everyday life in America with an entertaining dose of humor as well. Two men in their overalls, with tools in hand, stand together in what’s obviously a female’s bedroom. Just beyond the two is a quite ornate — and pink — vanity. Peering up at the two playful workers is a small dog, toward the bottom right corner of the canvas. Of course, the dog wears a gigantic pink bow on her back. Quite humorously, one of the plumbers has helped himself to one of the lady’s perfumes and is spraying a generous quantity into the face of his companion, who recoils with squinted eyes and sarcastic grin.

I was born in 1987, but I can’t help but smile at this mid-century masterpiece. The lightheartedness and technical brilliance of the painting were definitely on the minds of two spirited phone bidders yesterday, May 24, who jostled for over seven minutes at Sotheby’s New York in hopes of making it their own. When the hammer came down, the price had reached $14,975,000. Even more eye-popping is the fact that this painting was last sold in May 1996 at Sotheby’s — for $882,500, a world auction record at the time. Not a bad investment.

Auction estimates were between $5 million and $7 million.

This article was featured in Fine Art Today, a weekly e-newsletter from Fine Art Connoisseur magazine. To start receiving Fine Art Today for free, click here.