Everybody knows Ludwig Bemelmans' work (above). He's the guy who did the Madeline books.
Bemelmans was an outstanding gouache painter (example above) at a time when nobody took gouache seriously. The art critics were only interested in oils so Bemelmans and others abandoned their water media and took up oil, sometimes with disastrous results.
Here's the same scene as above, only Bemelmans painted it in oil this time. Which would you rather own?
Bemelmans made a big mistake. I'm second to none in my love for classical oil paintings (above), but I have to admit that there's something about the modern era that's not congenial with oil.
Whatever it is, it may have been afoot even in Rubens' time. He was the acknowledged master of the highly finished oil painting, yet half his work feels impressionistic, and looks more like sketches than finished art. I don't think Rubens was lazy; he just found it difficult to convey with heavy oil what was in the air in his time.
No doubt our exposure to Japanese art influenced us. Japan made high art out of what essentially are cartoons. Of course we were already on the cartoon track with artists like Cruickshank, Daumier, Busch and Lear. Later on Lautrec, Picasso, Dufy and Miro would take it up. Cartooning really was the heart of 20th Century art.
Getting back to Bemelmans, I love his early cartoony pictures. They're not just a stylization of things he saw, but a suggestion of how it felt to see them.
Take the scene above for example. It's bracing and incongruous at the same time. That's how modern man sees everything, as a puzzling and exciting hodgepodge of opposites. In this case the opposites are technology and nature, light childish line used to portray heavy iron, rapid movement of colossal things, and the acceptance of it all by ordinary people.
What separates us from the past is that we moderns have no fear of living with contradiction and contrasts. We revel in it. We favor artistic styles that embody it.
I also like the kid way that Bemelmans draws. Here (above) he portrays the regimentation and technology that makes modern restaurants possible, and renders them in a style that suggests charm and childhood innocence.
