Milne Ramsey: From Realism to Impressionism, Lobsters to Landscapes...

Milne Ramsey was an American artist who surrounded himself with master teachers and other well known artists. Many of these people revolted against French academic art and its strict rules. He was able to learn from these experiences to develop his own style and technique. Ramsey's still life paintings were primarily done in a very realistic manner, while confronting Impressionism with his landscapes. These different styles showed that Ramsey approached his art with experiments rather than guidelines. The very subjects of still life’s and landscapes taught as being the least important genres from academia. Ramsey defied these academic rules by focusing on these two genres.

Milne Ramsey inherited most of his artistic fame with his wonderful still life paintings. The realistic depiction of the various objects showed his deep understanding of textures and color. His strong use of light made the objects look three dimensional and added depth through the work to give it more realistic qualities. Ramsey's still life paintings contain both organic and man made objects. “Still Life with Lobster” shows how Ramsey would approach these various textures. The lobster shell's organic texture paired with the smoothness of the white cloth and the ridges from the stem of the glass, all show how these different textural objects can be placed together to form a perfect composition.

While Ramsey’s still life paintings focus namely on Realism, his landscape depictions exude impressionistic qualities. Ramsey used thick impasto brushstrokes for texture and light, giving his works a sense of movement. Ramsey’s landscapes were often times very small in size which made them feel very intimate. The small figures incorporated into many of his landscapes furthered this intimacy in his landscapes. At MIR Appraisal Services, Inc., we have been fortunate enough to have researched and appraised several of Milne Ramsey's works.

As a plein-air artist, Ramsey’s use of light in his paintings was very important to convey mood. He was able to capture warmth and a sense of peace with his loose brushstrokes and dark earthy color palette. On the contrast, Ramsey conveyed an energetic fun with his vibrant still life depictions. While Milne Ramsey may have been known for his still life paintings, his landscapes were just as significant in forming his career.

To understand why Ramsey painted the way that he did, we must look at his life and education. During his early years, he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. There he was a member of the sketch club and elected president in 1874. During his time in the sketch club there is little doubt he knew Thomas Eakins, the great realist painter. The sketch club is the oldest artists club in America, and Eakins and Ramsey were members during the same time. There is strong belief that Ramsey used this time to study Eakins. They were also both students of Leon Bonnat, who was a well known French teacher of the arts. Ramsey spent a significant portion of his life living in France and studying the arts. Bonnat was a realist painter who taught his students to revolt against academic art and its teachings of idealism. Bonnat used these criticisms to teach numerous artists like Henri Toulouse-Lautrec and Georges Braque. Like these artists, Milne Ramsey didn’t just stop at Realism; he grew as an artist by incorporating different styles in his artwork, further enhancing his place in history.

Written and researched by Robert Snell

MIR Appraisal Services, Inc.
Principal Appraiser: Farhad Radfar, ISA AM
307 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 308
Chicago, IL 60601
Phone: (312) 814-8510

Works Cited:

http://www.sketchclub.org/PSC_ArchColl.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_art

http://www.askart.com/AskART/artists/biography.aspx?searchtype=BIO&artist=22046

Vivian Maier Tribute, Part I

Street photographers, near‐mystics or mystical scientists, encounter large bodies of data on the busy life of the street and quickly divine the gems, recording the evocative patterns, harmonies, dissonance and stark bones of plot that emerge; quoting Robert Adams, “The photographer hopes, in brief, to discover a tension so exact that it is peace.”1

This month of May at MIR, we pay homage to a sterling street photographer from the mid‐century—Vivian Maier, whose brilliant works we recently evaluated.

THE PERSONAL LIFE OF VIVIAN MAIER
Born in 1926 in New York, Vivian Maier moved to France in her early youth, returning to New York in 1951. She later moved to Chicago where she lived for the next five decades, earning money as a nanny in the northern suburbs of Chicago. Details of her private life are as mysterious as tightly wound, spooled film negatives.

The outward signs of her proclivity for art were, of course, her Rolleiflex camera, most always on a strap about her neck, her self‐proclaimed title as a “film critic,” and her eccentric dress—men’s shoes and jackets and big hats. Children for whom she served as a nanny remembered her as having, in the words of John Maloof, “a peculiar personality… she would bring home a dead snake to show them, or convince the milkman to drive them all to school in his delivery truck. They loved her.”2 Indeed, these grown children later rescued Maier from homelessness and
poverty in her advanced years, buying her an apartment and supporting her until her death in 2009.

JOHN MALOOF’S DISCOVERY
These scant details of her personal life and, most importantly, the evidence of her enormous breadth of masterful photographic work, indelibly tie Vivian Maier to John Maloof, who first came upon Maier’s impressive oeuvre. Maloof purchased a box of Maier’s negatives from an auction house, later acquiring several boxes of her materials from many fellow auction attendees. His Vivian Maier collection constitutes 100,000 negatives, roughly 1500 undeveloped rolls of film, and some of her rather poetic documentaries captured in moving film. Although Maloof contacted the auction house to find Maier, he was advised not to seek her out because of her fragile state of health; when he later attempted to find online information concerning Maier, he found she had passed away just days before.

Besides locating and speaking with a few of the grown children for whom she used to nanny, he has visited with some folks at Central Camera, where she purchased her film. They remembered her as a “’keep your distance from me’ type of person’” who was “also outspoken. She loved foreign films and didn’t care much for American films.”3 The nature of her character develops incrementally, like an image birthed in a darkroom—the common motifs center about her love for the cinema and her devoted photographic practice, although she kept her images strictly private.

VIVIAN MAIER’S CUMULATIVE, INEXAUSTABLE CATALOGUE RAISONNÉ
What an honor to witness the organic unfolding of Maier’s prolific body of work through John Maloof, rather than what could have been a stylized portrayal in a slick, overwrought exhibition catalogue—the works brought to the public’s attention in Maloof’s spirit of discovery, and posted on his blog (http://www.vivianmaier.blogspot.com/) as he develops the rolls, allow us all to witness the unfolding of a personality—we sense the complex emotional and philosophical temperatures of this photographer. (Isn’t it wondrous to reflect upon the fact that John Maloof has been in the process of developing some 20‐30,000 Maier negatives from the ‘60s and ‘70s?)4


Freed from the traditional formalized structure of selected works in a museum exhibition (Maloof deems a huge body of work— approximately 1 of every 10 photographs—excellently fit to post)5, we sense the larger stylistic scope of her works. Under the broad umbrella of “street photography,” we find Maier personally standing with her Rolleiflex camera—her pathos, wit, boldness, and love affair with strict black and white rainbows of the mid‐century all exposed for us.


OUR DEVOTION TO THE OUEVRE OF VIVIAN MAIER
It is exciting to anticipate the cultural resonance of Maier’s recently discovered works. Certainly we at MIR feel that it is an immense honor to serve as advocates for the works of Vivian Maier, and we look forward to serving as aids in preserving this important body of work for posterity.

Please visit our blog site again soon! Next week, I will showcase more images of Maier’s striking photographs along with commentary—also in the works: an interview with John Maloof, the marvelous excavator of this Maier treasure trove!

The staff at MIR Appraisal Services, Inc. seeks to fully understand the arts in their particular cultural contexts and to analyze relationships between various artistic mediums and genres; in this way we can broaden our expertise as art appraisers.

We are located just steps from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Cultural Center; please do give us a ring to set up an appointment for a verbal evaluation of your most prized works of art.

Researched and written by Jessica Savitz

MIR Appraisal Services, Inc.
Principal Appraiser: Farhad Radfar, ISA AM
307 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 308
Chicago, IL 60601
(312) 814‐8510

Foot notes/Works cited:
1 Szarkowski, John. William Eggleston’s Guide, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1976, 7.
2 John Maloof, from his blog: http://www.vivianmaier.blogspot.com/
3 Ibid
4 John Maloof, from his blog: http://www.vivianmaier.blogspot.com/
5 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/little-miss-big-shotfifties-
america-exposed-ndash-by-a-french-nanny-1811040.html

Hans Hofmann's Role in Abstract Expressionism

Hans Hofmann did much to progress the arts in the United States, teaching generations of American artists and heavily aiding in the development of Abstract Expressionism. A transplant from his native Germany, Hofmann traveled to the United States as a mature artist and brought with him a deep understanding of the European Avant-Garde that he mixed with artistic endeavors of the Post-Second World War era to create a distinctly American brand of visual artistic expression.

Hans Hofmann was born in Bavaria in 1880 and raised and educated in Munich. While he initially studied science and mathematics, Hofmann felt a calling to the arts and moved to Paris in 1904, taking art classes at the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere in the same class as Henri Matisse. This Parisian atmosphere of intense creation greatly influenced his later work, having been exposed to the great innovators of the era such as Picasso, Braque and Matisse. Fortunately missing conscription into the Great War because of an illness, Hofmann began teaching art in Munich, drawing an international reputation of high esteem because of his vast knowledge of Avant-Garde theory and composition.

Traveling to the United States to teach art at UC Berkeley in 1930 and settled permanently in the US after the Nazi party swallowed up Germany in 1933. Settling in New York, the already internationally known artist began to teach at his own school, having already had a number of solo exhibitions in Europe and the United States. While in New York Hofmann encountered the great American painters of the day, including Jackson Pollock who he met in 1942. Despite of an initial dislike for the artist, they became close and influenced each other’s work greatly.

During the mid to late 1940’s Hofmann discovered the style he is now most famous for, namely bold blocks of color abstractly composed in a usually rectangular form. These blocks, composed of brilliant fauvist color, express the artist’s “rigorous concern with pictorial structure, spatial illusion and color relationships” (Goodman). His paintings are internationally coveted and are contained within the world’s great collections including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Met, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.

MIR Appraisal Services, Inc. has had the good fortune of appraising pieces by Hofmann (above) and his contemporaries. As a research-oriented appraisal office, MIR is staffed with appraisers and researchers with a wide array of specialties and are as competent appraising an Abstract Expressionist oil painting as they are a portrait miniature or a diamond ring. We welcome you to explore our website and encourage you to call us with any questions you may have about our services. We are located on Chicago's Michigan Avenue, and we encourage you to schedule an appointment to visit our office and appraisal staff.

Researched and written by Justin Bergquist

MIR Appraisal Services, Inc.
Principal Appraiser: Farhad Radfar, ISA AM
307 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 308
Chicago, IL 60601
Phone: (312) 814-8510

Works Cited:
Goodman, Cynthia. “Hans Hofmann” on Oxford Art Online.
Hanshofmann.org/biography