Comments on: Cecilia Beaux

By: Jason Waskey

Jason Waskey — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:39:29 +0000

“I would rank her as one of the major American artists, period.”

Agreed. I’ve seen work of many of the other ‘major’ artists of the time, and Beaux’s work is consistently as good or better.

I saw the show in Tacoma, and it blew me away.

Aside from making devastatingly beautiful work, she also left an inspiring legacy of an artist who never stood still in terms of development. Her earliest work and her last pieces are great pictures– they are also very *different*.

By: David Apatoff

David Apatoff — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 18:59:44 +0000

Charley, the portrait you have singled out here normally hangs in the National Portrait Gallery here in Washington, in a long corridor with room after room of portraits of historical figures that very few people care about any more. Yet, there seems to be a lot of traffic to this particular portrait. People walk right past all the dusty, anonymous portraits of generals and politicians and go to this extraordinary portrait because they remember it and want to see it again or because they have heard about it from friends. It really sings out.

By: Visual Mercenary

Visual Mercenary — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 04:32:22 +0000

Touching piece of work, thanks for sharing the knowledge…

By: Charley Parker

Charley Parker — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 22:47:16 +0000

Thanks, Colin.

I agree that she should be much better known.

I think part of it was the supression of 19th Century realism by the post-war modernists, a residue of which is the davaluing of portraiture as “commercial” rather than “art for art’s sake”, part is the fact that she is overshadowed by Sargent, who is just so amazing he can eclipse even a painter like Cecilia Beaux, and part of it is still bias because she is a woman, dispite our cultural pretensions that we are somehow “beyond that” here in the 21st Century.

By: Colin Page

Colin Page — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 21:28:28 +0000

Great to see a review for this painter. I only heard of her in the last 2 years, and I was blown away. How does someone so accomplished disappear from history for so long? She creates some very nice portraits with brushwork that makes me seethe with envy.

Your right that there’s an added difficulty to painting figures/portraits. Part of it is also psychological on the part of the artist. Painters stop thinking in terms of shapes and colors and start thinking in terms of “nose,” “mouth,” “eyes.” It’s hard to remain focused on just looking for the lines in the image and not get wrapped up in what an artist thinks each part of the face SHOULD look like. The common phrase in art classes is, “paint what you see, not what you know.”

Great to see this painter getting a bit more exposure.