SEVEN BEAUTIES

Portraits of Seminal Painters and Text by Bill Rangel

Francis Bacon
1909-1992 (Irish-born, British)

Bacon depicted biomorphic gures in sparse, brightly colored interior spaces. Sometimes there are lines on his canvases that suggest some sort of clear box that contains a gure. There's an overall sense in Bacons work that the gures/people are specimens in their own domestic laboratories, and they are emotionally dissected and/or physically inverted for the viewer to observe and analyze. Bacon's work has been regarded as horric, but whatever his intentions were, to me the results are kind of fun: weird gures screaming, funhouse faces, meat, umbrellas, baboons, etc., it's all kind of a carnival of sorts; the viewer goes from one visual exhibit to the next, giddily anticipating the next oddity. Bacon was not an ocial art historian, but he knew a lot about art history and referenced great works in his own.

Francis Bacon

Max Beckmann
1884-1950 (German)

Beckmann's self-portraits are like a study of the moon in all her various stages of luminosity. I'm particularly drawn to the ones that show him backlit with his facial features in silhouette, because they suggest that the viewer is better lit, and he, Beckmann, is studying the viewer from the canvas. To a contemporary viewer, Beckmann's greatest works might look like manic cartoons, but his deft use of primary colors and black outlines signaled his intention to leave behind something on the level of Gothic stained glass windows.

Max Beckmann

Charles Demuth
1883-1935 (American)

Although Demuth mostly did still-life watercolors of owers and fruit, and oil paintings of factories, his overarching subject was time. His fractured imagery and gradating colors resonate like the sound of a clock ticking away, and the viewer senses a span rather than a moment in time. He also did hilarious nightlife scenes, many of which showed playful gay encounters. And he is credited as a godfather of pop art. But his greatest works are his still-life watercolors; there's something otherworldly about them.

Charles Demuth

Gustav Klimt
1862-1918 (Austrian)

Klimt liked sex, and I respond to artists who rely on sex as a portal to their vision. He's mostly known for his gold period with sensual images of lovemaking, works that are undeniably impressive, especially in person, but I also really like his landscapes. Clearly, Klimt saw everything as design; most of his images have a mosaic or textile quality to them. Although ornamentation is the key to his overall style, he was deeply thoughtful about his adornments: patterns in nature, it seems, are the overlay through which we can all access the subconscious states that are required for us to live.

Gustav Klimt

Oskar Kokoschka
1886-1980 (Austrian)

Whatever subject Kokoschka chose to paint during his very long career, whether a landscape or a portrait, he somehow seemed to capture it as if it were reected on the surface of a shimmering lake. There's an infectious, almost giddy nervousness to his imagery that makes me think of mental institution art, and I mean that in the best sense, because it's a gift for us to bear witness to raw vision.

Oscar Kokoschka

douard Manet
1832-1883 (French)

Manet intentionally delivered to his viewers an articial-looking world on canvas, images evocative of a still life from a play, or a narrative featuring characters who were theatrically lit. In his greatest works, all imagery is in the foreground, and he tested his contemporaries by using the politics of sex as his main subject. And he clearly stated with his imagery, repeatedly, that he was a feminist.

douard Manet

Pierre-Auguste Renoir
1841-1919 (French)

Like R. Crumb, Renoir blatantly objectied women, but similarly in a way that was total worship. His renderings of the female form are the stu of fertility goddesses, complete with absurd proportions. One might see his beautiful paintings as completely supercial, and they are, in a celebratory sense, but they are also hilariously twisted: In his greatest works, Renoir envisions a world of giant, eshy women who have oddly small heads. The towering female bodies romp and lounge about, all the while visually dominating any and all space. There's almost no air in any of these images, many of which are depicted outdoors! From Renoir's point of view, it's as if he's a scientist who has discovered a rare species of gargantuan female creatures, and he's spying on them and taking eld notes from a close distance.

Pierre-Auguste Renoir

Seven Beauties
Portraits of Seminal Painters and Text by Bill Rangel

Part of the Echo Park Rising event August 17-18, 2013 Los Angeles Pizza Company 1498 West Sunset Blvd. Suite 2 Los Angeles, CA 90026 The portraits are 40 x 48 each, acrylic and latex on cardboard. About Bill Rangel Rangel utilizes a variety of painting methods for all of his multifaceted paintings. His images--expressionist, classical, surreal, erotic--are charged with the calm sense of a knowing eye. Each stroke of the brush is decisive even as it surrenders to the moment; for all the kinetic splendor of color and line, the viewer discovers simultaneity in every image. www.billrangel.com