Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Charles Dana Gibson
American; 20th-century
Islesboro, ME: Alice L. Pendleton Library
51%
Captain P. Leslie Rolerson. c1930. Oil on canvas
Of course it's worth mourning the fact that, within a few short decades, the innovations of advanced French painting had diffused so thoroughly within Western visual culture that a picture-peddler like Gibson, who was on the payroll at Collier's for his linework, could idle away his summertimes daubing out surfacey atmospheric portraits of sea captains in the mode of a degenerate Courbet. But hey, by definition, kitsch is the passage of authentic experience into mannerism and venal simulation. In this painting of Gibson's, there's no logic to the way the surface is worked and gouged, no order to the blendings of object into object. The miasma that is the floor of this drawing room is proof positive that rough handling alone does not necessarily a challenging picture make — a painting that is rough without differentiation, abstracting without aim, offers up its subject to uncritical contemplation as much as does a buffed-smooth and shiny surface. Sure, there's some compositional interest in the way that that open door at back left allows the otherwise thick image to breathe, and there's something a bit more than dilettantism going on in the curtains at right... but overall it's stuffiness made all the stuffier by how loose it's intended to feel. (I haven't even mentioned how unbearably brown it all is.) (TFS, 2025)
Islesboro, ME: Alice L. Pendleton Library
26%
Captain Warren. c1930. Oil on canvas
Apart from the obnoxious presence of Gibson's brush (which is an instance of the methods of advanced art having osmosed into mass cultural practice), there's something wrong with the weight of this picture, and with the way it relates to the space it's taking up. The sitter sort of balloons, but he also seems hemmed in by how the paint sits shiny and thin on the canvas's surface. Behind him, light is trying desperately to diffuse, but it's been halted in its efforts by the fumbling appearance of Gibson's, such that the picture's background is neither modernistically flat nor creative of depth or dynamism. It's instead a horrible non-space that serves to accentuate not just the awkward dimensions of the Captain, but also the apparent randomness with which Gibson has thrown down his brush all over the canvas, from the conifer of black marks at the painting's left to the blemishes all over his sitter's face. (TFS, 2025)