The Unforgettables: Expanding the History of American Art [1 ed.] 0520385551, 9780520385559

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THE UNFORGETTABLES

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THE PUBLISHER AND THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS FOUNDATION GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGE THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF THE RICHARD AND HARRIETT GOLD ENDOWMENT FUND IN ARTS AND HUMANITIES.

THE PUBLISHER GRATEFULLY ACKNOWLEDGES THE GENEROUS SUPPORT OF THE LITERATI CIRCLE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS FOUNDATION, WHOSE MEMBERS ARE: MELONY AND ADAM LEWIS THE DIDO FUND HARRIETT GOLD WILLIAM AND JUDITH TIMKEN CHARITABLE FUND SHARON SIMPSON

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THE UNFORGETTABLES Expanding the History of American Art

Charles C. Eldredge, Editor INTRODUCTION BY KIRSTEN PAI BUICK

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

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University of California Press Oakland, California © 2022 by The Regents of the University of California “Jerome Caja’s Provocative Legacy” © 2022 by Paul Karlstrom “Ernest Blumenschein: Humanizing the Other” © 2022 by Randall C. Griffin ® Bob Ross name and images are registered trademarks of Bob Ross Inc. © Bob Ross Inc. Used with permission. Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress. isbn 978-0-520-38555-9 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-38557-3 (ebook) Printed in China 31 30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 10

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Dedicated to the memory of Hyman Bloom (1913–2009)

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CONTENTS

Preface: Attention Must Be Paid! / xiii Charles C. Eldredge Introduction: Unk., Untitled, n.d., lost / 1 Kirsten Pai Buick MAKING FACES, AND MORE: PORTRAITS AND FIGURES, 18TH–19TH CENTURIES / 11

William Williams (1727–1791) / 13 Susan Rather José Campeche y Jordán (1751–1809) / 20 Andrew Connors John Greenwood (1727–1792) / 26 Margaretta Markle Lovell Sarah Goodridge (1788–1853) / 33 Elizabeth Kornhauser Charles Deas (1818–1867) / 39 Carol Clark

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William Walcutt (1818–1882) / 44 Wendy Katz Elizabeth Nourse (1859–1938) / 50 Julie Aronson Ella Ferris Pell (1846–1922) / 57 Derrick Cartwright Theodore Wores (1859–1939) / 64 Scott A. Shields REDISCOVERING THE MODERN FIGURE / 71

Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones (1885–1968) / 73 Anna Marley Meta Warrick Fuller (1877–1968) / 78 Renée Ater Arthur Putnam (1873–1930) / 84 Thomas Brent Smith Margaret Sutermeister (1875–1950) / 90 Anthony W. Lee Bill Traylor (ca. 1853–1949) / 96 Leslie Umberger Morris Hirshfield (1872–1946) / 102 Richard Meyer Gerald Nailor (Toh Yah) (1917–1952) / 108 Elizabeth Hutchinson Doris Emrick Lee (1905–1983) / 114 Amanda Burdan Philip Evergood (1901–1973) / 120 Alan Wallach Ernest L. Blumenschein (1874–1960) / 125 Randall C. Griffin Frederick C. Flemister (1917–1976) / 131 Rebecca Zurier Miki Hayakawa (1899–1953) / 138 ShiPu Wang

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Belle (Goldschlager) Baranceanu (1902–1988) / 144 Bram Dijkstra Chuzo Tamotzu (1888–1975) / 150 Anne Collins Goodyear Robert Neal (1916–1987) / 157 Michael Lobel Hughie Lee-Smith (1915–1999) / 162 Alona C. Wilson Charles Henry Alston (1907–1977) / 168 Austin Porter Paul F. Keene Jr. (1920–2009) / 175 Kristina Wilson Larry Day (1921–1998) / 182 Ruth Fine May Stevens (1924–2019) / 188 Patricia Hills Christina Ramberg (1946–1995) / 195 Cécile Whiting Benny Andrews (1930–2006) / 202 Melanee C. Harvey Jerome David Caja (1958–1995) / 209 Paul Karlstrom Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani (1920–2012) / 216 Maki Kaneko Harry Fonseca (1946–2006) / 224 Amy Scott LIMNING THE LAND: TOPOGRAPHY AND TEMPERAMENT / 231

Eliza Greatorex (1819–1897) / 233 Katherine Manthorne Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922) / 239 Rebecca Bedell Carrie Lillian Hill (1875–1957) / 245 Graham C. Boettcher

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Albert Bloch (1882–1961) / 252 David Cateforis Marvin Cone (1891–1965) / 258 Jason Weems Edith Hamlin (1902–1992) / 264 Betsy Fahlman Constance Coleman Richardson (1905–2002) / 270 Lara Kuykendall Bob Ross (1942–1995) / 275 Jason LaFountain SPEAKING OF STILL LIFES—AND LISTENING TO THEM, TOO / 281

George Washington Carver (ca. 1864–1943) / 283 Travis Nygard Hobson Pittman (1899–1972) / 289 Sarah Burns Priscilla Roberts (1916–2001) / 294 Angela Miller Brian Connelly (1926–1963) / 301 Jeffrey Richmond-Moll ENRICHING ABSTRACTION / 307

Athos Casarini (1883–1917) / 309 Lucia Colombari Agnes Pelton (1881–1961) / 316 Erika Doss Helen Torr (1886–1967) / 323 Barbara Haskell Vicci Sperry (1899–1995) / 330 David M. Lubin Rico Lebrun (1900–1964) / 337 Dennis Carr Edward Hagedorn (1902–1982) / 343 Patricia Junker

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Olinka Hrdy (1902–1987) / 349 Mark A. White Charles Biederman (1906–2004) / 354 Patricia McDonnell Vera Berdich (1915–2003) / 361 Ilene Susan Fort George Morrison (1919–2000) / 367 Robert Cozzolino DESIGNING BEYOND THE EASEL / 373

Don Bernardo Miera y Pacheco (1713–1785) / 375 Josef Diaz John Joseph Holland (1776–1820) / 381 Wendy Bellion Martha Ann Honeywell (1786–1856) / 386 Alexander Nemerov A ski ba kwa (ca. 1846–1929) / 391 Gaylord Torrence Sarah Wyman Whitman (1842–1904) / 397 Erica Hirshler Raymond Loewy (1891–1985) / 403 Henry Adams David Beck (1953–2018) / 408 Elizabeth Broun Acknowledgments / 415 List of Contributors / 417 List of Illustrations / 421 Index / 427

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PREFACE Attention Must Be Paid!

“ATTENTION MUST BE PAID! ” Linda Loman’s cri de coeur punctuates Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller. It reaches beyond the proscenium to challenge us in our daily lives, for ours is an age of futures, of tomorrows, too seldom attentive to our yesterdays. Yet even in this forwardlooking age of new discoveries, some find time as well for rediscoveries, and recoveries. The rich cultural histories of numerous and varied American communities are being told for the first time or being reexamined in the light of more recent developments. For but one example, paintings by Wood Gaylor (1883–1957), an early twentieth-century modernist, had, like those by many of his contemporaries, been largely overlooked by subsequent generations of curators and collectors. It was not until 2021 that an exhibition of his work caught the attention of Roberta Smith, senior art critic for the New York Times. She lauded Gaylor’s “quietly dazzling achievement” that was finally and belatedly being recognized. Her review was aptly headlined “Once Invisible, Now Essential.”1 Such invisibility might befall even the most celebrated artists of Once Upon a Time, acclaimed Long Ago and Far Away, but subsequently lost in history’s shifting shadows. Consider, for instance, Hyman Bloom (1913–2009). Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning,

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figure 1 Wood Gaylor, Rites of Spring, 1916. Carved and stained wood, 12 ⁵₈ × 14 ½ in. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Museum purchase, 1984.21.

titans of our 1950s avant garde, reportedly referred to Bloom, their contemporary, as “the first Abstract Expressionist.”2 Whether the introverted, Boston-based artist deserved such accolades from leaders of the macho New York School is debatable, but the comment suggests the prominence that Bloom enjoyed in the postwar era. As with Gaylor, who was his senior by a generation, so too would Bloom’s name and fame be unfamiliar to many museumgoers today, decades after his prominence. Even educated and dedicated audiences might be puzzled by the reference. Hyman Who? In 2019, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) honored its adoptive son with a retrospective exhibition covering Bloom’s once-vaunted career as a painter and draftsman. And that same year, in a double corrective, the artist was the subject of a new monograph by Henry Adams and Marcia Brennan. Together, the two ventures represent the first substantial coverage of the artist’s career since Bloom’s mid-century heyday. The MFA’s exhibition, Hyman Bloom: Matters of Life and Death, was curated by Erica Hirshler. It was the artist’s first major

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figure 2 Hyman Bloom, The Hull, 1952. Oil on canvas, 37 ⁵₈ × 45 ½ in. Worcester Art Museum. Gift of the William H. Lane Foundation, 1977.145. Photo © Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts/Bridgeman Images.

museum exhibition since a 1954 show organized by Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. That earlier show had subsequently been featured in a national tour to San Francisco’s de Young Museum, the Albright Gallery in Buffalo, and the Whitney Museum in New York City. In the years between it and the MFA’s retrospective, Bloom received occasional notice in the art press; he also presented a few dealer gallery shows of recent work; he was even the subject of two museum exhibitions, albeit organized by smaller institutions with more local audiences than those he had enjoyed in the national tour of 1954. The “first Abstract Expressionist” had to wait sixty-five years before his return to center stage! By then his Warholian fifteen minutes of fame had expired, and so too had the artist. Sic transit gloria mundi. A similar fate awaited countless talented creators in any generation. Art critic Eleanor Heartney, reviewing the new Bloom retrospective for Art in America, was intrigued by the once-familiar painter and praised the exhibition. But she was also puzzled by it. “Why do some artists become canonical,” she wondered, “while others, equally respected at the time,

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fade into obscurity?” Once upon a time, the answer to that question would have been simple: Quality. Today, however, that highly subjective response is challenged by various interests that upend an earlier consensus and lead to revisions of traditional historical narratives. Heartney concluded that “Bloom’s achievement is further proof of the inadequacy of the established canon. And it raises the question—how many other Hyman Blooms are out there awaiting rediscovery by art history?”3 One might reasonably ask what defines an artist and his or her work as neglected or, in Heartney’s words, as “fading into obscurity.” It might be the subject’s absence from major textbooks on American art. Or from professors’ lecture notes or seminar syllabi. Or the artist’s nonappearance in a Whitney Biennial (or Carnegie, Venice, Basel, etc.). Or perhaps local notice but unfamiliarity on a broader scale. As with definitions of quality, so too are there many individual judgments about the meaning of neglected or its synonyms. Inspired by Heartney’s comment, I passed along to a few colleagues the critic’s question about “how many other Hyman Blooms are out there.” The answer should come as no surprise: A lot! Their responses were provocative and each was exemplified by nomination of a unique artist from our past who deserves new or renewed attention. It quickly became apparent that no single, definitive answer to Heartney’s question was possible. The responses to my initial query sparked the idea of soliciting from a larger assembly of experts—curators and directors, professors, archivists—thoughts on the subject of deserving artists and erased reputations, a topic that might form an interesting article or perhaps an engaging panel discussion at some professional conference. I had initially imagined a gathering of six or eight, maybe even a dozen participants; toward that end, I sent out invitations to several dozen people, expecting the usual declinations. Some of the invitees I’d known well and worked with previously, while others I knew only from their fine scholarship. The recipients’ interest was piqued by the question, and responses began to arrive in larger quantities than expected. It quickly became clear that Heartney’s remark warranted something more than a panel discussion or brief opinion column. The idea of an anthology began to take shape. More interest was expressed. More invitations were issued. And more nominations and explanations arrived, no two alike. Of course, one volume alone could not provide a definitive answer to the critic’s query. But a collective contribution to the roster of deserving artists might advance the conversation. It was not intended as a contest of superlatives (Best, Most, Favorite, etc.). Neither was it intended as a challenge to the canon, although some respondents may have been so motivated. Instead, I conceived this collection as a complement to that scholarly accumulation— an effort to augment and enrich the canon, not to replace it. As one curator recently noted, “The future is most fertile on the edges of the canon.”4 Some earlier specialists had summoned attention to the record and the worthies missing from it. For instance, in 1947, John I.H. Baur, a prominent museum curator and later director, proposed Charles Caleb Ward, Fitz Hugh (sic) Lane, and Charles Deas for renewed consideration. Deas has, in recent years, received that, particularly from Carol Clark, who is included in this volume; and the correctly renamed Fitz Henry Lane has figured even more

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figure 3 Fitz Henry Lane, The Western Shore with Norman’s Woe, 1862. Oil on canvas, 22¹₈ × 36¼ in. Cape Ann Museum, Gloucester, Massachusetts. Gift of Isabel B. Lane, 1946 (1147c). Photo provided by Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons CC0 License.

prominently in studies of nineteenth-century landscape and luminism by Barbara Novak, John Wilmerding, and others. Given the recognition awarded to Baur’s trio today, his batting average (.666) was pretty good. And Charles Caleb Ward may yet emerge from the shadows. Baur explained that “the pursuit of an unknown artist is much like exploring a dark room where the hand yields clues which often look surprisingly different when light is finally admitted.” Rediscovery and reconstruction have “a two-fold significance,” he wrote, in that “it is the revelation of an individual and it is part of the cultural atmosphere in which other painters worked. . . . [I]t is through the by-ways of our art as much as through the welltrodden paths that we are gradually reaching a fuller understanding of the complexity and richness of our native schools.”5 In the post–Civil War era, a growing number of artists worked, exhibited, and sold to American audiences, especially in New York City. The landscape painter Robert Swain Gifford provides one good example of that city’s thriving art culture. Gifford (1840–1905) was a National Academician, a member of the fashionable Century Association, and also part of the Tile Club, a small fraternity that included such luminaries as Winslow Homer, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Stanford White. He was a friend of Louis Comfort Tiffany, with whom he traveled and painted in Egypt and North Africa in 1870. In the 1880s, he was hailed by the prominent critic S.R. Koehler as “the most prominent representative in the United States” of a modern landscape tendency “towards simplicity . . . [and] close intimacy with Nature[’s] . . .

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figure 4 Robert Swain Gifford, Near the Coast, ca. 1885. Oil on canvas, 31¼ × 51 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of an Association of Gentlemen, 1885, 85.7. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

most familiar aspects and least formal moods.”6 Gifford was a contemporary of, but not related to, the landscapist Sanford R. Gifford. As the sun rose to shine brightly on luminist painters like Sanford R., R. Swain was eclipsed by the new stylistic vogue, which was apparent both in contemporaneous practices and, even more influentially, in later scholarship. But his challenges didn’t end with Sanford. “There used to be only two 19th-century Giffords to consider,” the New York Times mischievously reported in 1987, “the well-known Sanford Robinson (1823–1880) and the comparatively obscure Robert Swain. Now there are three, because of the work of Charles Henry Gifford (1839–1904) uncovered by historian John I.H. Baur” in the 1940s (he is apparently unrelated to either of the other Giffords).7 Robert Swain Gifford’s life’s work was the subject of a major memorial exhibition of 132 works at the Century Association in 1905, after which he largely disappears from our histories, not to reappear in a significant solo exhibition until 1974, and then at the Whaling Museum in his hometown, New Bedford, Massachusetts. Rediscoveries and recoveries continued in the modern era. By the 1970s and 1980s, as noted by Bruce Robertson, “artists’ reputations and oeuvres were being recovered at a phenomenal rate . . . as the market for nineteenth-century American painting mushroomed.”8 But the reconsideration was not limited to obscure and distant ancestors; even as the burgeoning market for voguish innovations and “emerging” artists grew, those already emerged inspired renewed interest. In 1977, New York Times critic Hilton Kramer predicted that “the

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1970s are going to be known as the decade in which the entire history of modernist art in America began to be significantly rewritten.” It was a fertile period in which artists once “consigned to the limbo of lost reputations are being rediscovered and others long admired are being re-evaluated.” An exhibition at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Modern American Painting 1900–1940: Toward a New Perspective, was the subject of Kramer’s review. That ambitious exhibition, curated by William C. Agee and Linda Dalrymple Henderson, was accompanied by a detailed and substantial catalogue; like the publications that accompanied similar subjects of that period, Kramer claimed that the Houston catalogue provided “a fresh view of American art that has suffered over the years from being represented again and again . . . by the same few standard works.”9 The recuperation of reputations and the reassessment of history noted by Smith, Robertson, and Kramer have only increased in recent decades. Curator Robert Cozzolino, one of today’s most ardent and discerning champions of the undervalued, describes his entire career as spent “looking away from what I was taught was the center, poking away at tired narratives, reinserting artists that had been written off, integrating rather than replacing.” He admits to favoring “artists who did not fit, were deemed too weird, too personal, too difficult, and too local.”10 Cozzolino is among the contributors to this volume of unforgettable artists. Like him, many of the authors seek to integrate the record rather than replace the canon. In some cases, their nominations were evidence of a long-held passion for an individual artist’s work, in others a recent discovery that the author was eager to share. In some cases, scholars chose creators outside their usual professional specialty, while others delved deeply into a period or a medium with which they were already well acquainted. Such (re)introductions to neglected talents might yield a fuller picture of the nation’s rich and diverse creative history and a new appreciation of the individuals and communities that have contributed to it. Other essayists would likely have proposed a different cast of subjects, for no such personal sampling of views could hope to be definitive or restrictive. These are certainly not the only artists deserving of reappraisal. My hope is that this collection might provide inspiration to others working in the field, including curators and professors, students seeking research topics, collectors—in short, anyone interested in new views of old art. Many of the authors have provided short lists of suggested readings for those who wish to learn more about an artist. While basic biographical details (life dates, training, primary locations, patronage, etc.) are important, I was far more engaged by the authors’ responses to the question “Who’s your Hyman Bloom?” It is a question that prompts personal responses ranging from the sentimental to the academic, and essays rich in anecdote and analysis. Some days, my own nominee might be Ruth Asawa (1926–2013). In 2017 and again in 2020, her delicate, woven-wire sculptural forms were presented at the David Zwirner Gallery. These solo exhibitions marked the return of work by the California artist to the New York gallery scene, where she had not been featured in a solo show since 1958. It was an overdue return, as noted by the press. In praising the work, the New York Times noted that “in a culture of acknowledging those who were

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figure 5 Ruth Asawa, Untitled (S.108 Hanging, Six-Lobed, Multi-Layered Continuous Form Within a Form), ca. 1960–69. Copper and brass wire, 136¹⁵ ₁₆ × 23 × 23 in. Private collection. Photo © Christie’s Images/Bridgeman Images. © 2021 Estate of Ruth Asawa/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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previously overlooked, when artists and their earliest champions are finally getting their dues, there is a satisfaction in seeing the record corrected.”11 The celebration of the late artist was furthered in 2020 when the U.S. Postal Service honored her with a series of ten Asawa postage stamps, each illustrating a different example of her wire sculptures. I have long been attracted by the less well known and the totally forgotten. None of my recovered artists has yet wound up serving the USPS, but they have enriched collections and enlivened exhibitions over the years. For instance, I knew nothing about Charles Walter Stetson (1858–1911)—other than that he was the first husband of pioneering feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman—until I discovered his artistic estate languishing unseen in a selfstorage unit in California. Many of those paintings were included in a touring exhibition that I curated, and several now hang in the Smithsonian American Art Museum and other fine collections. I had never appreciated Claude Buck (1890–1974) before I found a large accumulation of letters and journals stored beneath his widow’s bed; the Buck papers are now preserved in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian, and in 1983 they served as inspiration for a revealing exhibition and catalogue of his work by Paul Karlstrom. I first encountered the work of Edvard Fristrom (1864–1950) in New Zealand, where my museum host’s delight in Fristrom’s freshly observed landscape paintings was so contagious that I launched my own investigation of his career; the eventual outcome was an article on the artist before and after New Zealand—his formative years in his native Sweden, and then his late years, after his emigration to the United States, where he painted the lovely Marin County landscape and partnered with the Sanity in Art crowd in California, chapters of his life not previously studied by Kiwi scholars. Rex Slinkard (1887–1918) was for me simply a name in Marsden Hartley’s correspondence until I was invited to write a catalogue essay for a show of Slinkard’s work at Stanford’s Cantor Art Center, which houses much of his artistic legacy. I had never heard of the Texas painter Kindred McLeary (1901–49) until I encountered his scandalous painting of a seduction in a Southern cotton field. His bold transfer of Titian’s Danaë and the shower of gold to a Black fieldworker’s shower of bolls now figures in my recent study of harvest imagery in American art. Local clubwomen and clergy missed the artist’s rich Renaissance references and were so upset by the picture that McLeary had to leave his native state for the balance of his short career. Looking ahead, I might propose to work on the Moravian preacher and painter John Valentine Haidt (1700–80), whose straitlaced congregants we know today from his portraits. Or perhaps the remarkable ceramist, muse, and raconteuse Beatrice Wood (1893–1998). On yet other days, my list might be headed by Chesley Bonestell (1888–1986), whose Space Age fantasies from the 1950s mark him as a futurist of a different sort; or the painter Carol Haerer (1933–2002), whose lyrical abstractions on shaped canvases, viewed with the artist in her barn in rural New York state, evoke the spirit of places that inspired them. Or perhaps my nominee would be the creator of some of our most memorable images, done in various media and over a long period of time—Ms. or Mr. Anonymous. The authors whose essays follow have proposed their own candidates for remembrance, uniquely personal selections that collectively attend to our rich cultural past. I hope they

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might illuminate the once invisible, perhaps even make it essential, and provide satisfaction in attending to a record augmented, a legacy enriched. Attention must be paid! — The essays are grouped in chapters loosely defined by type: figurative images, traditional or modern; landscapes; still lifes, and so on. I sought to avoid labeling an artist by style, or separating subjects on the basis of race, gender, geography, or other extra-aesthetic factors. Within each chapter, artists are arranged in approximate chronological order—the approximation allows for some revealing juxtapositions. The table of contents provides only the artist’s name and life dates, followed by the author’s name. A roster of all essayists is found in the list of contributors. Some authors provide suggestions for further reading on a subject; other leads for additional information may be found in an essay’s endnotes or online. In a few cases, there is no other published material available on a forgotten artist. Hence the overall aim of this project: to provide easy perusal of such lives and works, once lost or unappreciated but now recovered and ready for reconsideration. charles c. eldredge hall distinguished professor emeritus university of kansas NOTES 1. Roberta Smith, “Once Invisible, Now Essential,” New York Times, January 22, 2021, C1. 2. Erica E. Hirshler, “A Body of Work,” in Erica E. Hirshler, ed., Hyman Bloom: Matters of Life and Death (Boston: MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2019), 36. See also Henry Adams, “The First Abstract Expressionist?,” in Henry Adams and Marcia Brennan, Modern Mystic: The Art of Hyman Bloom (New York: D.A.P., 2019), 11. 3. Eleanor Heartney, “Mortal Remains,” Art in America 107, no. 9 (2019): 49, 53. 4. Jessica Bell Brown (associate curator of contemporary art, Baltimore Museum of Art), “An Affirmation,” Art in America (May/June 2021): 75. 5. John I.H. Baur, “Unknown Painters of the 19th Century,” College Art Journal 6, no. 4 (1947): 277, 282. 6. S.R . Koehler, American Art and American Art Collections, vol. 1 (Boston: E. Walker and Co., 1889), 242. 7. Vivien Raynor, “In First Major Exhibition, Another Gifford Comes to Light,” New York Times, February 15, 1987. 8. Bruce Robertson, “Catalogues and Books: Museum, Academia, and Publishing,” American Art 11, no. 2 (1997): 8. 9. Hilton Kramer, “Art: Revisionism Mines Historic Lode,” New York Times, July 13, 1977, C18. 10. Robert Cozzolino, “Claiming the Unknown, the Forgotten, the Fallen, the Lost, and the Dispossessed,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 2, no. 2 (Fall 2016), https://editions.lib.umn. edu/panorama/article/robert-cozzolino-patrick-and-aimee-butler-curator-of-paintings-minneapolis-institute-of-art/. 11. Thessaly La Force, “The Japanese-American Sculptor Who, Despite Persecution, Made Her Mark,” New York Times Style Magazine, July 26, 2020.

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KIRSTEN PAI BUICK

INTRODUCTION

Unk., Untitled, n.d., lost

T

HE PROCESS OF FORGETTING HAPPENS

in real time and it has a

name. I first understood it as a process when I encountered Howardena Pindell at a moment of transition in my life. Having graduated from the University of Chicago with a bachelor’s degree in art history and a focus on medieval Italy, I was trying to stay engaged in the art world while answering telephones for a major corporate real estate company in downtown Chicago. I attended galleries and art expositions; I visited museums and art happenings. And during my tedious hours at the switchboard, I read art history, critical theory, and every available magazine on contemporary art. Two readings stand out from this period of transition: a copy of Edward Said’s Orientalism purchased from the remainder table of Kroch’s & Brentano’s, and Howardena Pindell’s seminal essay on racism in the art world, which rocked the selfcongratulatory delusions of New York’s museum-and-gallery system.1 I was amazed by the amount of work that went into what she had done— interviewing every museum and gallery in the five-borough region and asking: How many women had they shown? How many nonwhite artists? She would later incorporate her findings into a traditional art piece, Art Crow/Jim Crow (1988), but I consider her original research 1

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figure 6 Howardena Pindell, Art Crow/Jim Crow, 1988. Illustrated book with four photogravure and letterpress and two letterpress, page 6 ¹⁵/₁₆ × 6 ¹⁵/₁₆ in. Printer Peter Kruty at Solo Letterpress, New York. The Museum of Modern Art. Gift of Mrs. Henry I. Cobb and Joanne M. Stern Fund, 152.1989.1–6. Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art; licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

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and publication of her discovery inseparable from her work as an artist. Before ever seeing her art or meeting her, it is symbolic, I have always felt, that I encountered her words and her numbers and her facility for statistics first—words and numbers that made me aware of the large gaps in my education, aware of the silences and absences of artists of color and artists who were women in the museums and galleries that I had visited. They were words and numbers of power and inescapability, words and numbers that held us all accountable because even if you were not responsible for those exclusions, they forced you to answer the question “What are you going to do about it then?” I went to graduate school, and at the University of Michigan I learned to listen for absences, for silence, and for the silenced. I asked questions of myself and of my mentors. I discontinued my studies of medieval Italy in favor of art of the British North American colonies and art of the United States; and I developed specialties in African American art, landscape representation, the visual and material culture of the first British Empire, histories of science and medicine, and women as patrons and collectors. Listening for absences, for silence, and for the silenced is difficult, however. Pindell’s study reminds us that forgetting is an active process that happens in real time and is structurally produced. Robert N. Proctor, who teaches the history of science at Stanford, informs us that “forgetting” is one of the many surrogates of “ignorance”—the study of which he and the linguist Iain Boal termed agnotology. They refined the term to suggest the “historicity and artifactuality of non-knowing and the non-known—and the potential fruitfulness of studying such things.”2 Ignorance can be made or unmade, Proctor argues, but we must question our assumptions about it as “something in need of correction, a kind of natural absence or void where knowledge has not yet spread.”3 Far from existing uniformly as a corrective, the beauty of the present volume, with its myriad voices, demands that we question the normalization of ignorance and the causes of forgetting and that we ask, “Forgotten by whom?” The histories of women as patrons and collectors have long intrigued me, and I have been fortunate to teach in a university that allows me the freedom to pursue those interests. One reason is that I believe it is important to look back at a critical time in U.S. history when the very foundation of current museum collections was built on the taste and wealth of American women. The erasure of the role of collecting and collectors in art history functions to normalize the visibility of certain artists as evidence of their importance, genius, and value. When collectors do appear, especially in the case of women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the celebratory narratives surrounding them obscure how soft power (influence, moral suasion, taste, sentiment, etc.) works to fuel and inform their agency beyond their wealth. For over fifteen years, I have had the pleasure of developing and teaching my seminar “Patronizing Women: Taste and Collecting in the 19th and 20th Centuries.” We begin the seminar by exploring the history of the idea of “taste” as a so-called “feminine faculty.” A legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment, taste connoted (in the words of Lori Merish) “a particular, expressly feminine, political faculty, associated with female bodily weakness (and, indirectly, with the ‘natural’ emotions of motherhood): not an expression of direct force or KIRSTEN PAI BUICK

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enactment of political will (‘power over’ an object), it connotes an act of will that turns against itself, sublimating ‘power over’ or direct use of an object into the imperative to ‘care for’ or preserve it.”4 In the class, we focus on four American women who wrote autobiographies and whose taste and collecting (care for and preservation of art) helped to shape and to define the aesthetics of European and U.S. modernism from the nineteenth century to the present: Louisine Havemeyer, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Gertrude Stein, and Peggy Guggenheim. Given the normalization of taste as feminine, we investigate how these women used this construct as an agent for risk, change, and power. Our goals are to understand the “autobiographical act” through theories of both autobiography and feminist and queer interventions in autobiographical theory. We consider the assigned autobiographies as a group, asking, for instance: How does the voice change from woman to woman, over time? What can and cannot be revealed? What does each woman consider important? How does she want herself to be remembered? What does “art” mean for each woman? To what extent can her collecting practices, exhibition practices, and legacies be understood as another type of “autobiographical act”? Each of these collector-authors was born before women in the United States had the right to vote; in such instances, what did “citizenship” and belonging mean to each woman? Of the four women, Peggy Guggenheim most directly addressed how ignorance (as active construct and strategic ploy) was affecting her legacy as the person who first brought Jackson Pollock to the world’s attention.5 In one of the rawest passages of any of these autobiographies, Guggenheim wrote: After I left New York, Pollock had a very unsuccessful show at Betty Parsons’ gallery. A few months later my contract with Pollock expired, and he remained with Betty without a contract until 1952, when he went to Sidney Janis’s gallery. Not being in New York, I had no idea what was happening, but soon I began to realize that little by little everything I had done for Pollock was being either minimized or completely forgotten. Catalogues and articles began to appear, ignoring me or speaking of me in inadequate terms, as in the case of Sam Hunter, later curator of the Minneapolis Museum [i.e., Institute of Arts], who referred to me in his introduction to a traveling Pollock show as Pollock’s “first dealer.” In the São Paulo catalogue and in the New York catalogue of the Museum of Modern Art, [J. Gray] Sweeney’s introduction to my first Pollock show was attributed to my uncle’s museum (where I knew Pollock had merely worked as a carpenter).6

Guggenheim’s list continues from there, with Pollock himself complicit in her erasure, in the active forgetting of who she was, in real time. The shameful culmination that reveals agnotology as the making of ignorance happened in 2000 with the Hollywood blockbuster Pollock, in which a fictional and messy sexual encounter between Pollock and Guggenheim puts her, finally, “in her place.” Within art history, there are other ways of forgetting. Sometimes, we forget as the very condition of seeing—forgetting as constitutive of visuality. Here are two examples that have consumed me for much of my time as a scholar of U.S. art: Mary Edmonia Lewis’s sculpture 4

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Forever Free (1867) and Thomas Crawford’s sculpture (generally conceptualized as Progress of Civilization) for a pediment on the U.S. Capitol building (1863). I first published an article on Lewis in the Smithsonian journal American Art.7 Lewis had never really been forgotten, but I believed that over time, the meaning of her monument to the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 had been lost or distorted: the standing figure of a man, fist raised triumphantly to display his broken chains while his other hand rests on the shoulder of a woman who kneels at his side; his foot resting on the symbol of his enslavement, the ball and chain; the woman, though her leg is still shackled, lifting her gaze and her hands prayerfully. Secondwave feminism, in its search for heroines, had ushered in a period of recovery. And during the 1970s, Lewis’s sculpture and Lewis herself were recuperated as a protofeminist statement and protofeminist artist, respectively, reflecting the double oppressions suffered by African American women, first under the weight of white racism and second under Black patriarchy. Something about the sculpture, however, prevented me from following that line of argument. I visited the sculpture at Howard University, and I made countless photocopies of it from books. On the photocopies, I drew lines and vectors of focus and consistently found a sense of comity between the male and female figures. Historical context seemed to confirm what I was seeing: emancipation had made marriage possible and legal for newly freed people; they were now free to perform middle-class respectability, modeled on heteronormative relations and “racially appropriate” gendered hierarchies; and African American women trusted African American men more than they did European Americans. Lewis’s own choices seemed to reconfirm what I was now able to see—my own process of “unforgetting”—since she wanted the sculpture unveiled in a ceremony dedicated to Henry Highland Garnet, a Black abolitionist famous for reuniting families torn apart by enslavement into a proper and properly racialized patriarchy.8 The second example of what a process of unforgetting can be occurred to me after many years of teaching Crawford’s sculpture in my survey of U.S. art. Assigned to supervise the extension of the U.S. Capitol in 1853, Montgomery Meigs decided, with the American sculptor Thomas Crawford, to develop the theme of racial conflict between whites and Native Americans as the subject for the decoration of the pediment over the entrance to the new Senate wing of the building. The concept was to juxtapose the “Progress of the White Race” to the “Degradation of the Indian,” with “America” personified in the center of Crawford’s composition. A careful examination shows us that America stands on a rock, against which the waves of the ocean are beating. She is flanked by the rising sun on her right and by a bald eagle on her left. She holds in her right hand a laurel and an oak wreath, which signify the rewards of civic and military duty, and holds them in such a way that each will be placed on the respective heads of the pioneer and the soldier who ensure the march of civilization. Even as she is the focus of their energies, it is the actions of the men who flank her that must fulfill her purpose; thus, the soldier, acting in her defense, appears to either draw or sheathe his sword while the artist captures the ax-wielding pioneer mid-swing. With her beseeching left arm and her heavenward gaze, she asks for the protection and blessing of God.9 I had been prepared to give the standard interpretation of the narrative: that it unfolds from left KIRSTEN PAI BUICK

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figure 7 Edmonia Lewis, Forever Free, 1867. Carrara marble, 41 ¾ × 21 ½ × 12 ³/₈ in. Howard University Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Photo provided by Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons CC0 license.

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figure 8 Thomas Crawford, Progress of Civilization, 1863. Marble, approximately 12 × 60 ft. East entrance to the Senate wing of the U.S. Capitol. Photo provided by Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons CC0 License.

to right (in the way we read) and that it simulates the geography and populations of East and West. But with my back turned to the sculpture—forgetting, again, being constitutive of sight—I realized that the concept was not reliant on writing/reading; rather, the inspiration was visual. Crawford’s sculpture was inspired by Catholic iconography; it is a last judgment in which America is placed where Christ normally is. The damned occupy her proper left (Native Americans, the forests, kinship ties among indigenous people—all forfeit) while on her proper right (populated by white men and boys, together with symbols of learning, knowledge, trade, etc.) the figures represent the saved. By not seeing, I could finally understand that unforgetting is also a process that does not necessarily rely on a void or something in need of correction. What I offered was simply another avenue of interpretation in an expanding art history. The idea and practice of an expanding art history brings me back to Howardena Pindell, whose work persistently asks: Who is responsible for remembering? What do they feel compelled to never forget? In Art Crow/Jim Crow, she chronicled forgetting as an active process of exclusion; however, in another example of her work, she uses the device of autobiography, but in visual form. Her mixed-media painting Autobiography: Water (Ancestors/Middle Passage/ Family Ghosts), from 1988, tells a multilayered story that she continues to enhance and nuance. Four years after the painting was finished, Pindell put pen to paper and described not KIRSTEN PAI BUICK

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figure 9 Howardena Pindell, Autobiography: Water/Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family Ghosts, 1988. Acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 118 × 71 in. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection, 1989.17. Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. Photo: Allen Phillips/Wadsworth Atheneum.

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only what she saw but also what she had learned of enslavement in the intervening years. The torture, the institutionalized rape and victimization, all that she had discovered caused her to approach her own work with fresh eyes—with the eyes of the beholder. As for me, every time I see the work—whether in person or as a reproduction—I am moved by the sight of the heavily worked canvas that signifies the cold waters of the Atlantic Ocean, which serves as a grave for millions of Africans. I am stirred by the outline of the artist’s body that seems both to float and to drown in that same ocean, while the eyes and the faces that surround her bear witness. So much presence is balanced by the representation and representational absence of the slave ship. The outline of the slave ship is immediately recognizable and is perhaps one of the most famous and evocative profiles in history, even as it is impossible to represent. Pindell’s burden of the unforgettable is embedded in the history of the United States and in the country’s reliance on agnotology as socially constructed ignorance. Writing in 1992, she noted: “An elaborate mythology has been developed to sanitize the history of the country. Although many may not acknowledge it, the facts do not change. Those who perpetrated the crimes carry the memories through the generations. This may explain the prevalence of addictions, child abuse, battering, and rape throughout all levels of American society. This may explain the demand for silence on the subject.”10 Pindell was feared in the art world. Some would argue that, like Peggy Guggenheim, she bore witness to erasure in real time. But something happened along the way. A changing art world that now acknowledges her talent and her brilliance means that she does not have to be included in the body of this anthology. If you search for the most recent stories about her, you will find newspaper articles like the one by Megan O’Grady, published in the “Style” section of the New York Times in February 2021. Pindell is featured prominently before one of her massive paintings—both the artist and the painting monumental and enigmatic—while the headline proclaims, “Once Overlooked, Black Abstract Painters Are Finally Given Their Due.”11 Those of us who have long known of Pindell and admired her tend to smile and ask, “Overlooked by whom?” But we happily accept the reassessment of her career. As Charles Eldredge notes in the preface, we must seek to integrate the record rather than replace the canon. We can accommodate the expanding canon. The Unforgettables: Expanding the History of American Art accomplishes as many things as the voices who contributed to its creation. The various essays not only model short-form writing of art history, but also serve as models of generosity/invitation/obligation to continue what was begun here. They force us to answer the question “What are you going to do about it then?” NOTES 1.  Pindell first published her report in 1987 as “Statistics, Testimony and Supporting Documentation” (https://pindell.mcachicago.org/art-world-surveys/statistics-testimony-and-supporting-documentation/), which she delivered on June 28, 1987, during the Agendas for Survival Conference at Hunter College, New York, sponsored by the Association of Hispanic Arts. The report was also published in Howardena Pindell, “Art (World) & Racism: Testimony, Documentation and Statistics,” Third Text 2, nos. 3–4 (1988): 157–190; and “Art World Racism: A Documentation,” New Art Examiner 16, no. 7 (1989): 32–35.

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2.  Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, eds., Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), 27. 3.  Ibid., 3. 4.  Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 43. 5.  Proctor discusses three, admittedly arbitrary, distinctions to begin the discussion of agnotology: ignorance as native state (or resource), ignorance as lost realm (or selective choice), and ignorance as a deliberately engineered and strategic ploy (or active construct). He adds, “There are of course other ways to divide this pie, and several of the contributors to [the anthology] provide alternative taxonomies.” Proctor and Schiebinger, Agnotology, 3. 6.  Peggy Guggenheim, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (London: Andre Deutsch, 1979), 345–346. 7.  Kirsten Pai Buick, “The Ideal Works of Edmonia Lewis: Invoking and Inverting Autobiography,” American Art 9, no. 2 (1995): 4–19. 8.  Kirsten Pai Buick, Child of the Fire: Mary Edmonia Lewis and the Problem of Art History’s Black and Indian Subject (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 9.  Kirsten Pai Buick, “Narrative Structure as Secular Judgment in Thomas Crawford’s Progress,” in Shirley Samuels, ed., Race and Vision in the Nineteenth Century United States (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), 169–181. 10.  Howardena Pindell, The Heart of the Question: The Writings and Paintings of Howardena Pindell (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 1997), 77. 11.  Megan O’Grady, “Once Overlooked, Black Abstract Painters Are Finally Given Their Due,” New York Times, February 12, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/12/t-magazine/black-abstract-painters.html.

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MAKING FACES, AND MORE Portraits and Figures, 18th–19th Centuries

FROM THE EARLY COLONIAL DAYS ONWARD ,

portraiture has remained a reliable source of commissions for American artists. We know the likenesses of many leaders in the churches, government, business, and society during the colonial and early Federalist periods through paintings by luminaries such as Charles Willson Peale, Gilbert Stuart, and John Singleton Copley. Those artists were accompanied by numerous others, less well known then and known not at all today. Styles and motivation for portraiture varied over time, but some semblance of truth in regard to the sitter’s appearance or persona remained an important goal. Portraits were not the only figurative imagery for which basic mastery of the human form was crucial. Life drawing had long been a vital aspect of artists’ training, whether in art schools here or in the European academies on which American art curricula were modeled. The roles of sitters or models changed over generations, as history paintings were supplemented by genre scenes of everyday life, classicizing nudes, and illustrations of literary texts, many of them figurative. All occupied attention and were based on the artist’s mastery of the human figure. In this chapter, painters, sculptors, and illustrators of various stylistic persuasions are grouped on the basis of a common preoccupation with the human form.

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SUSAN RATHER

WILLIAM WILLIAMS b. 1727, Bristol, England; active in British Colonial America, ca. 1747–1776 d. 1791, Bristol, England

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A mariner from Bristol, England, with sufficient education, experience, and imagination to write a fictive chronicle of castaway life among indigenous people of coastal Central America. An only modestly skilled but remarkably inventive and productive picture maker in Philadelphia, New York, and Jamaica. A versatile and enterprising painting tradesman with a talent for marketing. A collector of portrait prints and “lives” of artists at a time when few Anglophone models existed. The first teacher of Benjamin West, the colonial Pennsylvania boy whose international success after 1760 put Anglo-American artists on the map. These various personae—reliably but slimly documented—have intrigued a diverse group of authors for more than two centuries. As the subject of, or a prominent figure in, numerous books and articles and as a painter of works on regular display in a small but distinguished group of U.S. museums, Williams can hardly be called neglected. His tantalizing obscurity has been a—if not the—primary reason he fascinates; tellingly, most writers seem to enjoy highlighting the barriers to knowing him, even if they have managed to remove a few. As the most recent among them, I had no illusion of claiming the last word. The case of Williams offers one glimpse of the progress made HO WAS WILLIAM WILLIAMS?

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by a scholarly cohort determined to unflatten colonial American art history. And for other glimpses, if you haven’t looked recently, you might be surprised. I became interested in William Williams twenty years ago, nearer the start than the finish of a protracted study that examined how early American artists viewed themselves and how others understood them.1 Having written about John Singleton Copley and Gilbert Stuart, I could no longer avoid West, role model for the ambitious and conflicted Copley, mentor to the brilliant and personally subversive Stuart, and, by his early thirties, the London-based historical painter to George III. West was important, no doubt, and well documented—also steady, confident, capable, and, to my mind, a bit dull. I was attracted to the uncertainty evident in an early self-portrait drawing and, above all, in the circumstances surrounding the relentlessly certain Life and Studies of Benjamin West, Esq. (1816). Biographies of Anglophone artists were then rare, and this one—a collaboration between West and Scottish writer John Galt—is odder still in its focus on (and patent embellishment of) the aging artist’s previously unpublicized colonial boyhood. In Galt’s book, among several catalysts to West’s career, Williams received a nod but not a name. West had been privately more forthright with Thomas Eagles, a friend to Williams after his return to Bristol, declaring that “had it not been for him, I should never have become a painter.” I would add that had it not been for Williams, West might never have become an “American.” West’s chance encounter with Williams’s adventure story (part of a bequest to Eagles), Eagles’s memo of their subsequent conversation, and an ensuing letter in which West summoned childhood recollections of Williams collectively seeded the 1816 biography, the single most significant factor in West’s transformation from British establishment painter to indigenous, natural American talent. The title of my first article on Williams drew attention to the “conundrum” encountered by anyone who sought to learn anything about him. Williams emerged to history in the context of West’s old-age makeover, and much of what has been known about his life came filtered through West. Because West’s motivations mattered, I wanted to open that essay with his crumbling reputation before drawing out whatever threads of Williams could be extracted from the record independently of West. The journal editor preferred a more straightforward chronological account, so that’s what I provided, foregrounding Williams, as I would do more emphatically in ordering chapters of my eventual book. There Williams exemplifies enterprise, adaptability, and quiet aspiration, more so than the desperation once assumed in the lives of provincial “painters in general.” Such artist-artisans were sold short by contemporaries who cultivated the personae of fine artists and ultimately succeeded on those terms, leaving them in control of the historical narrative. Williams seems to have been rewarded for his enterprise across the British colonies, where he produced 241 (now mostly unlocated) paintings, by Eagles’s count in his summary transcription of the artist’s full original record. Compared to the estimated output of other colonial artists, it’s a substantial number, about 70 percent of Copley’s over roughly the same quarter century. Copley was unquestionably the superior talent, but Williams comes across as a man of greater imagination or at least greater willingness to experiment. Beyond the 14

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bread-and-butter of individual portraits, collectively represented as “innumerable,” Eagles singled out other subjects (also naming patrons), including a multi-figure “conversation” piece, a pair of historical scenes, a “tempest,” and a nocturne. The pair of landscapes and a surviving imaginary scene, together with settings in acknowledged portraits by Williams, appear as plausible extensions of the theatrical scene painting in which he engaged around 1759. There’s a novel, miniseries, or operetta in the story of Williams and the colorful characters whose lives intersected his. Among my most fascinating digressions while trying to reconstruct his painting career, none proved more so than the case of Lord Rosehill. That name appeared on Eagles’s cherry-picked list; the transcriber must have wondered, as I did, how a New York–based artist came to paint a “small Moonlight” for a British aristocrat. The search for Rosehill led me to Scotland and the 6th Earl of Northesk, whose impetuous seventeen-year-old son made an inappropriate, clandestine, and entirely legal marriage from which he immediately began trying to extricate himself. Sent to America in disgrace, David Carnegie, Lord Rosehill, took up with “Miss Cheer,” a leading lady in David Douglass’s theater company, whom he wed in 1768 (prompting the first wife to sue, successfully, for bigamy). As “Lady Rosehill,” the actress sat for her portrait by Williams, a former contract painter for Douglass and her neighbor on New York City’s “Batteaux Street.” That address has been part of the record since 1769, when Williams placed a newspaper ad to announce his relocation there. Once I was able to identify the legally platted name, it became possible to reconstruct the population and appearance of the street, a favorite stroll for Alexander Hamilton after his arrival at King’s College in 1774. Peripherality to my core book project, the need for specialized institutional resources, and inopportune timing prevented me from testing a late hunch that an unattributed portrait of a learned Black Jamaican, Francis Williams, might have been by William Williams, notwithstanding its customary 1740s dating. The figure in that extraordinary work recalls that of disowned Quaker abolitionist Benjamin Lay in Williams’s earliest known painting, produced no later than 1758 in Philadelphia. Lay was famously hunchbacked, short, and spindle-limbed, as the artist showed him, without obvious mockery. Intermittent presumption that the portraitist of Francis Williams intended a caricature struck me as unlikely for several reasons, even more so if the artist was indeed William Williams, whose Caribbean chronicle—first published posthumously as The Journal of Llewellin Penrose, a Seaman (1815)—expressed remarkable concern for racial justice. Most scholars assume that Williams traveled through the region as a young mariner, and he was certainly in Jamaica between 1760 and 1762, where he painted fifty-four pictures, according to Eagles. After returning to Philadelphia, Williams portrayed William Hall, the son of Benjamin Franklin’s publishing partner, as a bookish adolescent in a stylized setting much like that in the painting of the Jamaican poet and scholar. This may be wishful thinking. Technical analysis can rule Williams out as the Francis Williams portraitist or allow him to be ruled in. If the work is by him, a dozen doors will open. Paradoxically, some of the most intriguing evidence for Williams’s professional awareness comes from artifacts that seem most trade-bound: his shop signs. “The Sign of WILLIAM WILLIAMS

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figure 10 Unknown artist, Francis Williams, the Scholar of Jamaica, ca. 1745. Oil on canvas, 26 × 19 ¾ in. Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Gift of Viscount Bearsted M.C. and Spink and Son Ltd. through the National Art Collections Fund, 1928 P.83–1928. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Photo: The Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Images.

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figure 11 William Williams, Benjamin Lay, ca. 1750–58. Oil on mahogany panel, 14 ⁷/₈ × 14 ½ × 1 ½ in. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. The acquisition was made possible by a generous contribution from the James Smithson Society, NPG.79.171.

Hogarth’s Head” in Philadelphia and “Rembrandt’s Head” in New York were frank advertisements, like the newspaper ads that document them. Most fine artists shunned both, in favor of more covert self-promotion (Hogarth, at “Van Dyck’s Head,” had been an exception), whereas Williams seemingly compounded the error by advertising sign painting among other wholly artisanal services, incongruously alongside history painting. Far from concluding that Williams was professionally oblivious, I came to admire his savvy. In New York, Rembrandt’s Head at once acknowledged a lingering Dutch heritage and taste for the WILLIAM WILLIAMS

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figure 12 William Williams, William Hall, 1766. Oil on canvas, 71 × 46 in. Winterthur Museum, Garden and Library, Winterthur, Delaware. Gift of Henry Francis du Pont. Courtesy of Winterthur Museum, 1959.1332A.

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diverse painting genres for which Williams manifestly found local customers, the fundamentally British desire for portraits, and a robust metropolitan market for Rembrandt’s work. Such needs were met by London print sellers, including Nathaniel Smith at Rembrandt’s Head, a documented friend to Williams after his mid-1770s departure from America. Knowing that Williams collected portrait prints and assembled lives of artists (in a manuscript to which he appended the record of his own paintings) encourages a more poignant understanding of his trade signs. In Rembrandt and Hogarth, Williams conjured members of a professional brotherhood from which he did not exclude himself. Whatever limitations the colonial situation and his native ability imposed, Williams held on to an expansive vision of who or what an artist might be. And so, encouraged by his unforgettable example, should we. NOTES 1.  Susan Rather, The American School: Painters and Status in the Late Colonial and Early National Era (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, 2016). Chapter 2, “The Trade of Art in Philadelphia and New York,” 50–87, traces the history of interest in Williams (with details for all references here), analyzes the fragmentary evidence concerning him, and argues for the centrality of artisans/makers like Williams in early America.

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ANDREW CONNORS

JOSÉ CAMPECHE Y JORDÁN b. 1751, San Juan, Puerto Rico d. 1809, San Juan, Puerto Rico

José Campeche of Puerto Rico

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concepts in the Spanish colonies and imposed identities on individuals, permitting or limiting opportunities differently than in the English colonies of the Americas. Thus, an artist like José Campeche y Jordán could be born to an enslaved father who had recently purchased his freedom, and rise to the status of one of the most respected citizens in eighteenth-century Puerto Rico. The artist’s father, Tomás de Rivafrecha Campeche, had been owned by the Rivafrecha family of San Juan, a descendant of people captured and sold in the Spanish or Portuguese slave industry operating from West Africa. By 1751, when José was born, Tomás had paid off his own purchase to Canon Rivafrecha and was a free man. During his enslavement, Tomás had been trained in gilding, decorating, and painting and had earned funds by taking on independent projects with the permission of his owners. It was with those funds, presumably, that he began to make payments to Canon Rivafrecha, and at the time of his marriage to María Jordán, he had paid off all but 1,000 reales of his debt toward freedom. José, the son of a free Black father and a mother who had immigrated from the Canary Islands, was enrolled in the Dominican convent school to study Catholic thought and philosophy. He was also taught by his father in the decorative arts LAVERY AND RACE WERE DISTINCT

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trades, presumably assisting him with his work. By the age of thirteen, José had painted the royal coat of arms on seafaring vessels, including the mail ships running between Spain and its American colonies. Simultaneously, he was studying musical performance and composition with such competence that in the 1780s he was asked to serve in the San Juan Cathedral as oboist, organist, and flageolet player. By then he was already well known and respected as a portraitist and had received commissions to capture the likenesses of Puerto Rico’s governors and San Juan’s bishops, the most prominent individuals on the island. There was no art school on Puerto Rico at the time, and Campeche (as he was familiarly known) never left the island. While he learned from his father the basics of preparing pigments, priming wood or canvas supports, and mixing colors, he must have taught himself the more refined practices of composition, application of light and shadow, color theory, and proportion by relying primarily on books, including the 1780 publication Obras de Don Antonio Rafael Mengs: Reflexiones sobre la belleza y el gusto en la pintura. Thus, in his mature work, the rococo and early neoclassical influence of Anton Raphael Mengs (1728–79), the German, Italian, and Spanish court painter as well as director of the Vatican painting school, is clearly evident in Campeche’s compositions, expressive use of drapery, and classical balance. However, that book was illustrated with black-and-white engravings, with only written descriptions of color and hue. In eighteenth-century Puerto Rico, it was unlikely that Campeche saw many paintings in the European manner—so it was left to his creativity to fabricate his own interpretation of a painting tradition. The only apparent tutelage Campeche received in classical painting came when, to his great luck, the Spanish painter Luis Paret y Alcázar (1746–99) was banished to Puerto Rico by King Charles III, accused of pimping for the king’s brother. During Paret y Alcázar’s Puerto Rican exile (1775–78), Campeche’s painting skills developed significantly and began to reflect the compulsive detail created with the minute brushstrokes, complex palette, and delicate tones of the rococo aesthetic. With no artistic competition on the island, or anywhere throughout the Caribbean for that matter, Campeche created a successful career; and, without outside influence or patronage pushing him to innovate or experiment with new aesthetic or technical advances, his style was set. While painters in the Viceroyalty of New Spain continued to develop stylistically, and in 1785 the Academy of San Carlos opened in Mexico City to advance the classical tradition, Campeche remained one of the few masterful artists in the Caribbean and north coast of South America. The modest economy of Puerto Rico could not have supported more than one professional artist, and in the much wealthier economy of Havana, Cuba, patrons could commission work from the best artists of Mexico and Spain. Thus, with the notable exception of several major commissions for the cathedral and the cemetery chapel in Caracas, Venezuela—then the cacao-rich capital of the Spanish colonial Captaincy General of Venezuela—Campeche’s clientele was mostly localized within San Juan. His most public and largest works were generally Roman Catholic religious subjects following Spanish and occasionally colonial tropes and iconography. In these works Campeche expressed exceptional humanity and gentleness. While his compositions superficially JOSÉ CAMPECHE Y JORDÁN

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followed those of Spanish masters such as Bartolomé Esteban Murillo and Jusepe de Ribera, upon closer examination even Campeche’s most traditional religious paintings demonstrate wonderful passages of invention and adaptation of iconographic norms. His La Natividad (ca. 1799), created on a commission from Caracas, reflects his urge to infuse the subject with compassion, with believable humanity rather than a romantic belief. Here the Christ child engages directly with the gaze of Saint Joseph, who wears a simple laborer’s shirt. The light radiating from the child, not abiding by the laws of physics, unconvincingly illuminates the faces of the adults, yet spectacularly vitalizes the loving downward gaze and fascination expressed by the three disembodied faces of the winged cherubs snuggling up to the head of Joseph and capping the apex of the composition. At first glance a standard image, at second glance it appears to be an innocently heartfelt accomplishment personalizing a compassionate family out of icons. In striking contrast to his idealized and predictable religious paintings, Campeche was commissioned to portray many of the most important political, religious, and social leaders of Puerto Rico. In his highly detailed, extremely personal, and strikingly humane documents of the wealthy, powerful, and richly costumed elite, Campeche transformed the European tradition of large portraiture into microcosms of astute observation, obsessive accumulation of detail, and frequently unexpected and highly specific settings. He painted very few lifesize portraits, most of his images measuring less than two feet at the largest dimension. Within these small images, many painted on wood panel, he packed information about the sitter, the setting, and occasionally the artist himself. His intimately scaled portraits of elegantly dressed women riding spectacularly adorned horses through the Puerto Rican countryside contrast European clothing and conceit with backgrounds including banana trees, pineapples, and the traditional farm buildings of the mountainous island. Portraits of society women with their children are set in outrageously ornate rococo interiors, which probably never existed on the island. Government officials posed against second- or third-story open windows reveal their built accomplishments or responsibilities stretching into the distance. These works demonstrate such small-scale inventiveness that they could never be confused for the work of any other artist, certainly any artist in the Caribbean during this period. Feeling that there seemed to be no precedent, and similarly no descendant, of José Campeche’s distinctive vision elsewhere in the Spanish colonial world, in 1988 Philippe de Montebello, then director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, collaborated with the Museo de Arte de Ponce on a major exhibition of Campeche’s work, hoping to encourage others in the United States to appreciate the magnificent accomplishment of this primarily self-taught artist. With so few named artists known from this period anywhere in the Americas, thanks to the exhibition at the Met, some began to refer to Campeche as the Caribbean Copley. The artist’s lifetime coincided with a turbulent period in the American colonies. Irish engineers were coming to Puerto Rico to help build defenses (some of which may have been designed by Campeche) against the attacks of the British, and slaves were increasingly imported, not just from Africa but from throughout the colonial world, under pressure for agricultural plantations to generate income for the Spanish crown. In the same period, the 22

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figure 13 José Campeche y Jordán, La Natividad, ca. 1799. Oil on canvas, 33 ¼ × 27 ⁷/₈ in. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Teodoro Vidal Collection, 1996.61.6.

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figure 14 José Campeche y Jordán, Dama a caballo (Lady on Horseback), 1785. Oil on panel, 15 ¾ × 11 ⁷/₈ in. Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico. https://museoarteponce.org. Image provided by Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons License.

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soon-to-become United States began to assert its economic dominance and quickly became the primary consumer of Puerto Rico’s sugar production. It is not surprising that the reputation of this exceptionally skilled, visionary, and completely localized artist could not compete. Campeche’s personal records, papers, sketchbooks, and possessions were burned upon his death in 1809 to avoid possible contagion, ensuring that later historians and potential students could learn little of his techniques, inspiration, patronage and business sense, or philosophy of painting. In 1855 Alejandro Tapia y Rivera published the first and only full biography of the artist, relying on the memories of several informants who knew Campeche, his family, his patrons, or his sitters. That text, however, remains one of the few references to this Caribbean colonial master, the earliest artist working in the region whose name is even known. FOR FURTHER READING Tapia y Rivera, Alejandro. Vida del pintor puertorriqueño José Campeche. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Establecimiento Tipográfico de C.I. Guasp., 1854. Taylor, René. José Campeche y su tiempo. Ponce, Puerto Rico: Museo de Arte de Ponce, 1988. Vidal, Teodoro. Cuatro puertorriqueñas por Campeche. San Juan de Puerto Rico: Ediciones Alba, 2000. . José Campeche: Retratista de una época. San Juan de Puerto Rico: Ediciones Alba, 2005.

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MARGARETTA MARKLE LOVELL

JOHN GREENWOOD b. 1727, Boston, Massachusetts d. 1792, Margate, Kent, England

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of his birth— insofar as he is known at all—for his juvenilia, a number of modestly successful portraits created before he was twenty-five, and two unique objects: a mezzotint portrait he made at age twenty-one and a genre scene painted before he turned twenty-nine. While the portraits (and a family group) are similar to more successful counterparts created by his colonial contemporaries John Smibert and Robert Feke, these unique objects, Jersey Nanny and Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam, are harbingers of a career that, when looked at as a transatlantic whole, is characterized by extraordinary versatility and invention. Indeed, the fact that his work is held by the Louvre, the Rijksmuseum, and the British Museum as well as Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts argues a distinction unknown to the most celebrated American-born artists of the eighteenth century, which should arouse our curiosity. Greenwood was a painter, but he also produced mezzotints, etchings, and watercolor drawings and became a well-regarded auctioneer and importer of Old Master paintings in London. He is known to us as an American artist, but the Louvre categorizes him as belonging to the “Ecole hollandaise,” and the Victoria and Albert Museum catalogues his works in its collection as “British School.” His output includes, beyond OHN GREENWOOD IS KNOWN IN THE COUNTRY

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portraits, natural history illustration, landscapes, marine paintings, genre paintings, and at least one conversation piece. Well known to the notable transatlantic Americans of his generation, Greenwood painted John Adams, commissioned a painting from John Singleton Copley, sold Old Master works to Benjamin West, and handled mail for Benjamin Franklin.1 And he was highly regarded by the British cognoscenti. A memorial trompe l’oeil portrait mezzotint by William Pether—inscribed, on a palette below his bust, “The Friendly Mr. Ino Greenwood died 1792”—was acquired by the British Museum from the collection of Horace Walpole. Understanding art history to be the study of all dimensions of art production and reception—including canon formation, analysis of art markets, the history of collecting, the vicissitudes of artistic reputations, and the significance and scope of reproduction activities—integrates the discipline better with cultural history and gives it resonance beyond the narrow sphere it usually inhabits. Similarly, understanding art history in non-nationalistic terms gives us a better grounding on which to view, investigate, and value transnational careers such as Greenwood’s. Apprenticed at fifteen to “Thomas Johnston of Boston, an artist in water colors, heraldic painting, engraving and japanning,” Greenwood soon began making oil-on-canvas portraits of friends; one was the basis for a print by Peter Pelham, a gifted mezzotintist who was Copley’s stepfather.2 At twenty-one, Greenwood produced a mezzotint of his own: the remarkable novelty known as Jersey Nanny, a portrait of a working-class woman with patched garments fastened with straight pins. Signed “Greenwood ad vivum pinxt et fecit,” it was evidently engraved, in Pelham’s manner, after an oil portrait made “from life” by Greenwood. The accompanying verse ends, “Then Ladies, let not Pride resist her / But own that NANNY is your Sister,” a plea arguing for recognition of the unity of mankind. The project was evidently not a commercial success, given that only one impression survives, but it nevertheless gave us, surprisingly, the only woman’s portrait engraved in America until Martha Washington was so memorialized a half century later. At the age of twenty-five, Greenwood went to Surinam, a wealthy, slave-supported sugar-, cacao-, and coffee-producing Dutch colony on the Caribbean coast of South America, a trading partner with the English colonies to the north. There he painted the tropical fauna and portraits of the polyglot mariners who frequented the busy port city of Paramaribo, as well as the resident gentry.3 If his aim in sojourning for five years in this place—so different from New England in terms of climate, language, and culture—was to use his artistic talent and expertise to make money, then the venture was successful: his own accounting of his activities indicates that he painted 113 portraits and left Dutch Guiana in 1758 with 8,025 guilders (or 3,000 guineas) in cash, folios of Dutch prints and drawings, and a substantial library.4 Although Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam is the only painting we can directly link to Greenwood’s stay in Paramaribo, he did not record this work in the careful itemized accounting of his production and sale of paintings in the Dutch colony. Nor do we know for whom it was painted, although it appears to have been located in Rhode Island by about 1800 and may have gone there shortly after it was made. Perhaps most mysteriously, he JOHN GREENWOOD

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figure 15 John Greenwood, Jersey Nanny, 1748. Mezzotint, sheet: 9 ⁵/₈ × 7 ¾ in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Henry Lee Shattuck, 1971.715. Photo © 2021 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All rights reserved/Bridgeman Images.

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figure 16 John Greenwood, Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam, ca. 1752–58. Oil on bed ticking, 37 ¾ × 75 in. Saint Louis Art Museum. Museum purchase, 256:1948.

painted it on a large piece of old bed ticking, even though he brought with him to Surinam canvases (as well as frames) suitable for full-length portraits (80 × 50 inches). Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam is a candlelit tavern scene in which nineteen sea captains and their associates, dressed in the sartorial display of gentlemen, occupy a room with overturned bottles and wineglasses, broken chairs and crockery, and an accidental fire, suggesting the behaviors and errors in judgment associated with drunkenness. The denizens engage in boorish and antisocial behaviors—cheating at cards, pouring liquor on the face of a slumbering companion, and vomiting on one another and the floor. What’s interesting about this painting is the novelty of its subject, given that portraits were the only genre with any traction in the New World.5 The problem this painting gives us is one of tone. Is this a moralizing critique of excess in general, of these Rhode Island sea captains in particular, of slavery as a system of relations?6 Possibly. Is it a self-promotional canvas commissioned by the merchants pictured and/or one that the artist expected would generate portrait commissions among these very sea captains and their peers?7 Highly unlikely. While Greenwood and others were familiar with seventeenth-century scenes of carousing, it should be noted that theories of comedy clarify why such scenes typically picture peasants (and not the patron group) cheating, vomiting, and otherwise physically and mentally incapacitated. Yet it is clear that we are supposed to read the painting as comic, in the sense that the viewer is positioned as superior, in behavioral norms, to those pictured. I propose that, because it is painted on a handy fabric, it was started within the context of such a scene of carousing, perhaps as a prank. Throughout the eighteenth century, Providence was the rival of Newport for power in Rhode Island. Because the work descended in the Jenckes family, located in North Providence, and JOHN GREENWOOD

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figure 17 John Greenwood, Portrait of a Naval Officer with a Coastal Map and Binoculars in Hand, 1760. Oil on canvas, 32 × 24 ¹³/₁₆ in. Collection of Rijksmuseum, SK-A-4905.

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because, a century after the painting was made, a document was created that specifically identified the silliest and most stupefied of the party as powerful Newporters (while not identifying any of them as members of the Jenckes family), we can conclude that it was painted and gifted as a send-up for one of the Jenckeses. They didn’t take it very seriously, repeatedly allowing children to puncture, tear, and otherwise damage it.8 Greenwood did not return to North America but went to Holland, source of the art he most admired. There he continued to paint, draw, and make mezzotints. Apparently, connections made in Surinam were useful, given that Portrait of a Naval Officer with a Coastal Map and Binoculars in Hand, a portrait Greenwood painted soon after his arrival in the Netherlands, includes a map of the colony in the hand of a seafaring Dutchman, underlining his principal port of call. The fact that Greenwood signed and dated the work on the map links Surinam with the two men—subject and artist. The discipline of art history privileges novelty and invention, but only if it leads other artists to adopt and imitate techniques, subjects, and patronage strategies. Greenwood’s experiments in offering a print of a vernacular subject on one hand and genre painting on the other did not lead to imitation, but in retrospect they are important experiments, the fruits of an exceptionally fertile mind. That he also contributed substantially to connoisseurship and collecting activities in London is equally to his credit. NOTES 1.  Concerning Franklin’s mail, see Letter from Benjamin Franklin to Deborah Franklin, 14 September, 1761, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/?q = greenwood%2C%20john%201727–1792&s = 1111311111&sa = &r = 1&sr = (accessed September 20, 2020). 2.  Isaac J. Greenwood, Greenwood Family of Norwich, England, in America, ed. Mary M. Greenwood and H. Minot Pitman (Concord, NH: Rumford Press, 1934), 57–58; H.P.R., “Capt. William Baille, 17th Dragoons and John Greenwood of Boston,” Bulletin of the Museum of Fine Arts [Boston] 41, no. 244 (June 1943): 28–32; Alan Burroughs, John Greenwood in America 1745–1752 (Andover, MA: Phillips Academy, 1943), 49, 51. 3.  Greenwood’s diaries, preserved at the New-York Historical Society, include “No. 2” dating from his sojourn in Surinam, which includes a listing of the portraits he painted there; a number of Greenwood’s watercolor drawings of the creatures of Surinam are in the British Museum. See https://www.britishmuseum. org/collection/term/BIOG29743. 4.  Greenwood, Greenwood Family, 59; John Greenwood, Diaries, 1752–58, New-York Historical Society. 5.  Margaretta M. Lovell, Art in a Season of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005). 6.  David Bindman, Charles Ford, and Helen Weston, “Africa and the Slave Trade,” in The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 3: From the ‘Age of Discovery’ to the Age of Abolition, part 3: The Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 226–228. 7.  Katelyn D. Crawford, “Painting New England in the Dutch West Indies: John Greenwood’s Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam,” in David T. Gies and Cynthia Wall, eds., The Eighteenth Centuries: Global Networks of Enlightenment, 178–196 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2018), 184, 185. 8.  Edward A. Wild, “The Old Jenckes Picture,” ms, Curatorial File, St. Louis Art Museum.

FOR FURTHER READING Burroughs, Allan. “The Other Side of Colonial Painting: A Study of John Greenwood, Eighteenth-Century American Painter.” Magazine of Art 35 (1942): 234–237.

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Greenblatt, Stephen. “Cultural Mobility: An Introduction.” In Stephen Greenblatt et al., Cultural Mobility: A Manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Greenwood, Isaac J. Greenwood Family of Norwich, England, in America. Edited by Mary M. Greenwood and H. Minot Pitman. Concord, NH: Rumford Press, 1934. Morreall, John. Comic Relief: A Comprehensive Philosophy of Humor. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2009. Stedman, Captn. J. G. Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam in Guiana, on the Wild Coast of South America: from the year 1772 to 1777 elucidating the History of that Country, and describing its Productions, viz. Quadrupeds, Birds, Fishes, Reptiles, Trees, Shrubs, Fruits, & Roots; with an account of the Indians of Guiana & Negroes of Guinea, illustrated with 80 elegant Engravings from drawings made by the Author (London: J. Johnson, 1796).

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ELIZABETH KORNHAUSER

SARAH GOODRIDGE b. 1788, Templeton, Massachusetts d. 1853, Boston, Massachusetts

Sarah Goodridge: The Self-Fashioning of an American Artist

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in the art world has led to the gradual rediscovery of long-neglected female artists. An area of particular oversight is the medium of watercolor miniature portraiture executed on slivers of transparent ivory. This art form provided a rare entrée for women who aspired to pursue professional careers in the male-dominated art world, which restricted most from pursuing the competitive field of oil painting until the late nineteenth century. The less lucrative profession of miniaturist was thought, from its beginnings in the sixteenth century, to be suited to women because it required a special delicacy of hand and brush and was associated with emotion. Many women pursued this profession, but due to the fragility of miniatures as highly light-sensitive works, they are rarely on view in museums, thus reducing the number of works by women artists seen by the public, and diminishing scholarship in this field. This brief essay presents the artist Sarah Goodridge as exemplary of this egregious art-historical oversight. In the early twenty-first century, she rightly gained notoriety after an extraordinary self-portrait of her bare breasts—painted for her friend and lover, statesman Daniel Webster—was discovered (and acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2006). But she should not be defined solely by this one HE ISSUE OF GENDER EQUITY

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figure 18 Sarah Goodridge, Beauty Revealed, 1828. Watercolor on ivory, 2 ⁵/₈ × 3 ¹/₈ in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Gloria Manney, 2006, 2006.235.74. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

extraordinary work. Goodridge deserves to be more widely known for her exceptional life and career as Boston’s preeminent miniature portraitist, creating indelible likenesses in watercolor on ivory from 1815 to 1850. As a force in her own right, she persevered in the face of formidable obstacles, establishing a brilliant career and, as an unmarried woman, supporting herself and her extended family. Goodridge grew up as one of nine children in the farming community of Templeton, Massachusetts, and, according to her family, showed a propensity for art making, first using a pin to create drawings on birch bark. While largely self-taught, she corresponded with and likely received instruction from the Hartford-based itinerant miniaturist Elkanah Tisdale, remarking in a 1819 letter to him, “I should be very glad to receive that account you mention concerning miniature painting.”1 She would master the art of cutting fine shavings of ivory into the desired shape for a portrait, preparing the surface for watercolor by sanding it and treating it with gum arabic; and she learned to mix watercolor pigments with just the right 34

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amount of water to get the perfect transparent and opaque effects with her tiny brushstrokes. By 1820, Goodridge opened her own studio in Boston and established herself as a miniaturist, often creating two portraits a week. At the same time, she helped launch the career of her younger sister, Eliza Goodridge (1798–1882), who also deserves further recognition as a talented miniaturist and who authored an important written account of her sister’s life and career.2 The year before, Goodridge was introduced to the country’s leading artist, Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828), who, recognizing her talent, encouraged her to continue painting. He also advised her to take lessons from the London drawing master David J. Brown (active 1818–35), who ran a drawing academy in Boston. Goodridge visited Stuart’s studio frequently, obtaining advice on her work and making miniature copies of his oil paintings. After four years of informal instruction with Stuart, she painted two powerful portrait miniatures of the aged artist in 1825 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art). Stuart’s young daughter, Jane Stuart (1812–88), also a watercolor miniature and oil painter, commented that Goodridge’s portrait was the “most life-like of anything ever painted of him.”3 Having greatly advanced her technique and talents, she pursued a flourishing career in Boston for the next twenty-eight years. She exhibited her miniatures at the annual exhibitions of the Boston Athenæum between 1827 and 1835, a truly remarkable accomplishment in America’s antebellum art world. Many of Boston’s most prominent citizens came to her studio to have their portraits taken in Goodridge’s direct, realistic, powerfully individualized style. She owned a half pew in the Freeman Place Unitarian Church, Boston, where Ralph Waldo Emerson served as minister from 1829 to 1832. It was perhaps through this connection that she became acquainted with Emerson and the leading transcendentalists, who professed abolitionist sympathies. Goodridge painted a miniature portrait of Emerson, as well as two of his first wife, Ellen Louisa Tucker Emerson (1811–31). It was through this association that she encountered the newly emancipated slave, Rose Prentice (1771–1852), whose portrait she painted in about 1837–38 (Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven); today it ranks among her finest, most sensitively executed miniatures.4 The artist’s own self-image can be found in a series of four self-portraits that speak to her awareness of her accomplishments and are among her most striking works. In Self-Portrait (1830), with poised directness and confidence in her abilities, the artist stares out of the composition, conveying a look of good humor and intelligence. Goodridge’s most dedicated patron was the North’s best-known orator and statesman, Daniel Webster (1782–1852). As a U.S. senator and secretary of state he had ambitions to become president, but was also known as a drinker who lived beyond his means, incurring debts. Goodridge likely met Webster in 1819 in the studio of Stuart, who was then painting his portrait, and Goodridge was asked to paint a miniature of Webster’s young daughter, Julia. A lifelong friendship ensued, which included a lively correspondence that is preserved in forty-four letters from Webster, although none of Goodridge’s have survived.5 Webster’s letters do not reveal the exact nature of their relationship, but his signatures betray his deep affection for her, writing, for example, “Yrs always truly” and “I shall not go away without SARAH GOODRIDGE

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figure 19 Sarah Goodridge, Self-Portrait, 1830. Watercolor on ivory, 3 ¾ × 2 ⁵/₈ in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Miss Harriet Sarah Walker, 95.1424. Photo provided by Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons 2.0 License.

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figure 20 Sarah Goodridge, Daniel Webster, 1827. Watercolor on ivory, 3 ½ × 3 in. Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 03.136.

seeing you.” While Webster spent most of his time in Washington, he frequently traveled to Boston, and Goodridge would paint over a dozen portraits of Webster, as well as numerous miniatures of his children, grandchildren, and other relatives. Her second portrait of Webster, painted in 1827, is a romantic portrayal of her intimate friend, who looks out at the viewer with smoldering eyes. A year later, in 1828, Webster’s first wife died and Goodridge left Boston for the first time, traveling to Washington to see the bereaved senator. In the same year, according to Webster’s descendants, she painted a nude self-portrait of her disembodied breasts, entitled Beauty Revealed, and presented it to Webster in a closed case, for his eyes only. This one-ofa-kind artwork, painted in puritanical Boston, is both confrontational and erotic. When seen in person, the miniature takes the viewer aback. The luminous white breasts, carefully delineated in transparent watercolor on translucent ivory, are surrounded by a cloud of white cloth and are individualized, with red nipples and a distinctive mole on the left breast. A precedent for this unique work was the British craze in the late eighteenth century for “lover’s eye” miniatures. The disembodied eye carried a similar sensuous message to one’s lover, SARAH GOODRIDGE

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while allowing the sender to remain anonymous. What was Goodridge’s intention here? We know that Webster would immediately seek an older, socially prominent, wealthy second wife to further his political career, marrying Caroline LeRoy, of New York. Was she sending a message to her lover about what he might miss? We also know that Goodridge’s relationship with Webster—including correspondence, visits, and her willingness to lend Webster substantial amounts of money to cover his debts—would last until the end of their lives, each dying within a year of the other. Beauty Revealed, along with Goodridge’s paint box and brushes, descended in Webster’s family. It is hoped that in a future exhibition, the artist’s life and career will be fully celebrated and the significance of this work as an example of protofeminist artistic self-fashioning can be further explored. NOTES 1.  Quoted in Mona Leithiser Dearborn, Anson Dickinson: The Celebrated Miniature Painter (Hartford: Connecticut Historical Society, 1983), 24, n.19. 2.  Published in George C. Mason, The Life and Works of Gilbert Stuart (New York: Charles Scribner’s and Sons, 1879), 77–82. 3.  John Hill Morgan, Gilbert Stuart and His Pupils (New York: The New-York Historical Society, 1939), 61. 4.  My thanks to Keely Orgeman, Alice and Allen Kaplan Associate Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture, Yale University Art Gallery, for information on the Rose Prentice miniature. 5.  Letters from Daniel Webster to Sarah Goodridge can be found in the libraries of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Papers 1682–1885.

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CAROL CLARK

CHARLES DEAS b. 1818, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania d. 1867, New York, New York

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role in histories of the art of the United States. He’s a one-picture wonder whose The Death Struggle (1845, Shelburne Museum) is included in many scholarly discussions of western art. Deas belongs more centrally in our canon because his work addresses race, competition, and conflict in ways that are critical to understanding America in the nineteenth century and today. Moreover, recognizing that Deas consistently addressed these themes throughout his decade-long career should remove him from the limiting category of “western artist.” Born to an elite East Coast family, Deas had to make his own living when he came of age because the family fortune had declined. He chose a career in art and moved to New York City to study at the National Academy of Design and to exhibit and sell his work there. But the financial crises of the late 1830s and the lure of new subjects pushed and pulled him west. After traveling in the Upper Midwest for more than a year (1840–41), he settled in St. Louis, where he made his home and living for the next six years. Deas exhibited and sold many of his paintings back in New York City, which briefly brought him the national attention he sought. Suffering from mental maladies, he returned to New York in 1847 and was institutionalized the following year. When he died in 1867, HARLES DEAS PLAYS A MINOR

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figure 21 Charles Deas, Walking the Chalk, 1838. Oil on canvas, 17 ³/₈ × 21 ³/₈ in. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Museum purchase funded by the Agnes Cullen Arnold Endowment Fund, 2007.740. Photo provided by Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons CC0 License.

still living in an asylum, his art disappeared, too. His brief career, partially reconstructed since the reappearance of his paintings beginning in the mid-twentieth century, has been seen as sharply divided between early eastern genre and literary subjects and late western images of trappers, traders, and American Indian peoples. I hope to bridge this divide and to make a case for the thematic consistency and the importance of his art with three littleknown paintings, each of which returned to public view in the past twenty-five years. Walking the Chalk resurfaced in Nova Scotia in 2007, having last appeared publicly in 1839 at the National Academy of Design. The ostensible subject of this genre painting is a barroom wager on a drunken man’s ability to walk a straight line. Deas’s initial audience saw the painting as a humorous treatment of a somewhat crude subject that the artist had not adequately moralized. But they missed his point. Look again. The young man seated at right stares at the chalked line in dismay, realizing he will lose whatever he wagered to the barflies whose winks and thumbed nose alert us that the young man is a mark and the bet is rigged. 40

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The chalk-walker, only appearing to be drunk and disheveled, is successfully, even theatrically, navigating the line. Apart from all the others, an old Black man, seated on a stool and silhouetted against a bright red curtain in the background window, leans forward and plants his foot on the white chalked line. Deas constructs this man, an outsider, as the one who knowingly puts his foot down on the barflies’ fixed sobriety test. His action also alludes to the color line he cannot cross, taking a moral stand on America’s rigged competitive and racial structures. Winnebago (Wa-kon-cha-hi-re-ga) in a Bark Lodge was hidden in plain sight on the walls of the St. Louis Mercantile Library until 1996, when the organization’s librarian, John Hoover, questioned its attribution to George Catlin. The painting—unsigned, undated, and undocumented—came into the library’s collection by 1869, along with three related portraits. Technical comparisons with a painting known to be by Deas and two signed oil sketches of identified Ho-chunk (Winnebago) leaders that surfaced in 1990 (The Lunder Collection, Colby College Museum of Art) led not only to a firm attribution of the four Mercantile portraits, but also identified Wa-kon-cha-hi-re-ga as one of the sitters. His portrait differs from the others in quality and intensity. Deas extended portraiture into narrative here by animating his protagonist and including two collaborators. The man appears to be rising inside a bark lodge to focus his gaze on something beyond our vision. In each lower corner an eerie face peers out from the shadows, giving the picture an even greater aura of intrigue. Deas leaves unresolved the source of the man’s alarm or the role of the two men in shadow, but conflict is brewing. The identity of this man, whom Deas likely met about 1841, and the obscured peace medal he wears around his neck suggest that the conflict was with whites: Wa-koncha-hi-re-ga, whom whites called Rolling Thunder, was a famed Winnebago leader who had led opposition to the federal government’s efforts in 1837 to move his people farther west. Deas’s portrait presents collaborative and determined, if precarious, Native power in a relentlessly, often violently expanding white nation. If conflict is implicit in Walking the Chalk and impending in Wa-kon-cha-hi-re-ga, it breaks wide open in The Wounded Pawnee, a painting that disappeared from public view after the American Art-Union distributed it to a member in 1848. Although the family who brought it to my attention in 2015 had owned it since about 1950, I’m in the dark about where it was in the intervening century. Deas’s large exhibition painting of intertribal warfare is likely based on stories he heard of the June 1843 Lakota raid on one of the Pawnee villages near the Loup River in present-day Nebraska, just a year before Deas visited the villages. He focuses on one mounted warrior fleeing attackers we cannot see, barely keeping his seat as his horse leaps over a stream. The color red carries our eye across the painting’s surface: blood flows from wounds inflicted by arrows and bullets of the better-armed Lakota, and it spills onto the rocks by the side of the stream. The suffering of man and beast that we witness gives the painting its emotional punch. Deas’s initial audience, who had little to say about the picture, likely saw the warrior as a generic Indian, destined to disappear under the pressure of white movement across the continent. But we can read this story differently—as one of resistance emerging from a stereotype—by recognizing resolve as well as terror in the warrior’s eyes and knowing that the Pawnee people survived battles with other tribes and removal from CHARLES DEAS

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figure 22 Charles Deas, Winnebago (Wa-kon-cha-hi-re-ga) in a Bark Lodge, 1842. Oil on canvas, 36 × 30 in. From the collections of the St. Louis Mercantile Library at the University of Missouri–St. Louis.

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figure 23 Charles Deas, The Wounded Pawnee, 1845. Oil on canvas, 25 × 30 in. Private collection. Courtesy of Dara Mitchell LLC.

their villages along the Upper Platte and Loup rivers, to Oklahoma, home today to some of the thirty-two hundred enrolled members of the tribe, who also live across the United States. A Black man enlightens Walking the Chalk, and a Black man’s action ignites the meaning of two more of Deas’s four surviving late-1830s literary and genre paintings on the theme of greed. Like Wa-kon-cha-hi-re-ga and The Wounded Pawnee, his western paintings address conflict among Native tribes and with whites. Racial conflict and competition—for resources, for land, for power—are at the heart of them all. These three paintings and others by Deas illuminate a dark decade in America’s history. FOR FURTHER READING Clark, Carol. Charles Deas and 1840s America. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009.

CHARLES DEAS

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WENDY K ATZ

WILLIAM WALCUTT b. 1818, Columbus, Ohio d. 1882, New York, New York

William Walcutt, Mazeppa, and the Know-Nothings

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be called a one-hit wonder. His 1857 painting Demolishing the Statue of George III in the Bowling Green, New York, July 9, 1776 (Lafayette College) is fairly well known. It has been published by historians and has appeared in popular periodicals, usually serving more as a (seemingly) realistic portrayal of an historic act of iconoclasm than as itself a subject of inquiry. Accordingly, the artist and his style, career, milieu, and other artworks have been, for the most part, ignored. This is a mistake on aesthetic grounds alone. He was well trained as a painter and sculptor, including winning a medal in Paris, and his historical compositions were carefully researched. In his own day, his outline illustrations were called masterly and his public sculpture was said to be the best in the country. The tastes of the nineteenth century, of course, are not necessarily the same as ours today. But for those interested in the history of transatlantic cultural exchange, I would add that his career sheds light on intriguing aspects of American art’s absorption of European ideas. His 1853 copy of Jean-François Millet’s Mazeppa américain mixed romanticism and realism in a somewhat surprising way, portraying heroic white manhood as a naked frontiersman bound to his horse. His book ILLIAM WALCUTT TODAY MIGHT

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figure 24 William Walcutt, Simon Kenton’s Ride, ca. 1859. Oil on canvas, 57 × 83 in. Kentucky Historical Society, 1904.5.

illustrations demonstrate an equally peculiar American adaptation of the intricacies of Victorian fairy painting. But it’s not only on an aesthetic basis that I argue for studying him. What is striking to me is that this mainstream, typical, mid-century artist was endorsed by Thomas R. Whitney, a leading organizer of the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic, Know-Nothing party and a politician who was elected to Congress in 1855, when the nativist movement peaked. Walcutt was a regular contributor to Whitney’s magazine, the Republic, and though Walcutt was not himself a nativist or an ideologue, the ways that his work and practice intersected with KnowNothing patriotism demonstrate how embedded and pervasive the ideas of this supposedly fringe movement were within American art. Despite the diversity of Walcutt’s output, it was consistently supported by circles hostile to “foreign” religious or political influence. And that has implications for better-known nineteenth-century historical and narrative art. As an example of the intersections between mainstream subject matter and nativism that Walcutt’s practice as a writer/painter illuminates, I want to briefly consider his “western” art. Along with poems about his “Native home” in the West, Walcutt published a short story, “Joel Wetsel the Indian Hunter,” in Whitney’s Republic. His protagonist is based on legendary colonial frontiersmen, including James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking. These “free men of the forest” were men whose bravery and cleverness were the result of their origins in American nature, as their proximity to American Indians, whether as friends or WILLIAM WALCUTT

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figure 25 William Walcutt, illustration from Parke Godwin, Vala: A Mythological Tale (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1851), 33. Hathi Trust Digital Library, digitized by Google, from original in the New York Public Library.

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enemies, attests. Walcutt compares Wetsel’s shooting skills to those of a rich man. When Wetsel wins a contest, instead of marrying a trader’s daughter, he stays with his rifle, Sally Ann. Such an ending suggests that, like Leatherstocking fleeing westward, the heroic backwoodsman was destined to disappear as domestic, commercial civilization advanced.1 Whitney’s Republic featured accounts like this because native-born artisans were a substantial part of the Know-Nothing movement; Whitney himself was an engraver. Many of them opposed an expanding market that eroded their economic independence even as it attracted immigrants who accepted lower wages. Walcutt, about a year later, painted the shooting contest from Cooper’s Pioneers. He structured the picture around a comparison of Leatherstocking—the frontiersman who despises the townsfolk’s “wasty ways,” their pointless (commercially dictated) destruction of nature—and his rival, the archetype of the market-oriented pioneer who, if he sees a tree, chops it down.2 Leatherstocking’s elongated body, clad in a mix of American Indian and Anglo-American dress, evokes Walcutt’s description in the Republic of the deadly accurate Kentucky rifleman, whose tall figure “seemed to grow, phantom-like, higher and higher” as he shot.3 A Mohican warrior sits next to Leatherstocking, looking pensive. Nativists, because of their emphasis on men and women who were born on American soil as the only true citizens, deliberately aligned themselves with both the red and the white men of the forest. Indeed, one of the messages of the nativists was that it would be better for “the aborigines of our native forests, and the slaves of our southern plantations” to be admitted to citizenship, than foreigners.4 By the time Walcutt painted Cooper’s turkey shoot, Cooper’s novels had associations with the belief that the influx of non-Protestant foreigners was incompatible with American democracy. Cooper himself longed for the old New York, dominated by “the true, native portion of the population, and not the throng from Ireland and Germany, who now crowd the streets,” and he warned in print of the “advent of a new race” of Americans “who will neither understand nor appreciate colonial society and its construction.”5 More than three million European immigrants had arrived in New York between 1846 and 1855, many of them Catholic, giving impetus to Cooper’s complaint and to the Know-Nothing party’s growth. In this atmosphere, Walcutt’s pictures, like the general outpouring at mid-century of paintings of colonial times, could easily be understood as designed to instruct viewers on who the real Americans were. Walcutt’s patron for Deerslayer at the Shooting Match, sarsaparilla magnate Samuel P. Townsend, seems to have shared these concerns. An early manufacturer, with ties to older artisan culture, he worried that the arrival of “European serfs” would turn Manhattan into the “seat of a new dynasty, that would receive its inspirations from the Holy City.” Foreigners, still enslaved by medieval culture and religion, lacked the ability to think freely and independently that had been developed by the native-born. Writing after the Know-Nothing party had dissolved, Townsend proposes a new but still implicitly Protestant party that will better protect a Christian nation “cut from the Bible.” The party’s banner is to be “God, Liberty, Fraternity, Prosperity and Progress,” and under this motto, it will take the Kingdom WILLIAM WALCUTT

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figure 26 William Walcutt, Deerslayer at the Shooting Match, ca. 1853. Oil on canvas, 25 × 37 in. Private collection. Image courtesy of Freeman’s, Philadelphia, 2021.

(the United States) “under the whole Heavens and possess it for ever and ever.”6 The vision of an egalitarian, fraternal American art and spirit that would spread progress across the globe was shared by many reformers, but it was still bound to the belief that only certain groups could be truly American. Catholicism was part of a feudal, monarchical past from which Americans had fought to free themselves, not part of the progressive future. The subjects of Walcutt’s historical art, the native-born Anglo-Americans who battled the British or the Indians, who won independence from tyrants and extended their domain, were thus models for contemporary republican citizens. But they also readily aligned with anti-immigrant views. The career of William Walcutt, then, suggests we might profitably reconsider much of nineteenth-century American art. Narratives of the period tend to downplay the role of nativism, just as the party itself disappeared into the Republican mainstream. But rather than an aberration, its exclusionary beliefs about citizenship were paradoxically wedded to statements about egalitarian democracy and nature’s noblemen by artists like Walcutt. Precisely because Walcutt and his peers and patrons were not official members of political groups like the Know-Nothings, the coincidence of their work with nativist themes demonstrates how enmeshed American nativism was, and perhaps still is, with “American” art. 48

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NOTES 1.  William Walcutt, “Joel Wetsel, A Story of the Backwoods,” Republic, October 1852, 196–197. 2.  James Fenimore Cooper, The Pioneers (1823; New York: Airmont, 1964), 190–192. 3.  William Walcutt, “Recollections of the Last War, No. 2, Incidents in the Battle of New-Orleans,” Republic, January 1852, 21–22. 4.  Dale T. Knobel, “Know Nothings and Indians: Strange Bedfellows?,” Western Historical Quarterly 15, no. 2 (1984): 175–198; 176. 5.  Thomas S. Gladsky, “James Fenimore Cooper and American Nativism,” Studies in the American Renaissance, 1994: 43–53; 49, 50. 6.  S. P. Townsend, Our National Finances, No. 11 (New York: Baker & Godwin, 1865), 39, 52.

FOR FURTHER READING Bellion, Wendy. Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019. Katz, Wendy J. Humbug! The Politics of Art Criticism in New York’s Penny Press. New York: Fordham University Press, 2020. Marks, Arthur S. “The Statue of King George III in New York and the Iconology of Regicide.” American Art Journal 13, no. 3 (1981): 61–82.

WILLIAM WALCUTT

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JULIE ARONSON

ELIZABETH NOURSE b. 1859, Mount Healthy, Ohio d. 1938, Paris, France

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of a woman cradling her slumbering infant so impressed the jury of the annual Salon exhibition in Paris that they selected the painting to hang “on the line,” a location of honor. The mother’s hands tell a story. Her fingers are not the tapered, bejeweled affairs of John Singer Sargent’s society matrons; rather, her large, sturdy hands denote one who performs physical labor. The mother’s loose, slightly opened blouse suggests that she has just finished nursing. Her face concealed in shadow, she turns away from the viewer to gaze at an angelic baby, whose illumination conveys a reverential tone. Firm draftsmanship underlies the confident depiction. Blues, lilacs, mauves, and browns harmonize on the large canvas, the first notable professional success of an Ohio native, Elizabeth Nourse. By 1914, Woodrow Wilson and his wife, the painter Ellen Axson Wilson, had acquired A Mother (Une mère); the painting graced a wall in the president’s Princeton study. Today, this auspicious beginning is Nourse’s signature painting, having in recent years represented the artist in the touring exhibitions Americans in Paris 1860–1900 in 2006 and Women Artists in Paris, 1850– 1900 in 2017.1 Nourse’s inclusion in these intersecting projects reflects a positive effort to reinsert the painter and her female colleagues into N 1888, A POIGNANT DEPICTION

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figure 27 Elizabeth Nourse, A Mother (Une mère), 1888. Oil on canvas, 45 ½ × 32 in. Cincinnati Art Museum. Gift of the Procter & Gamble Company, 2003.93.

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art history—because, with very few exceptions, they remain at the periphery and unknown to the public. The painting also played a starring role in 1983 in the only large monographic exhibition and publication devoted to the artist, Elizabeth Nourse, 1859–1938: A Salon Career, a monumental research undertaking by the late Mary Alice Heekin Burke presented at the Cincinnati Art Museum and the National Museum of American Art (now renamed Smithsonian American Art Museum). More than thirty-five years later, Nourse’s reputation is generally that of a “Salon” painter with the conservatism that implies. Certainly, Nourse (a devotee of Ruskin) remained committed to the representation of nature, and her solid academic education in Cincinnati, supplemented by a short period at the Art Students League in New York, undergirded her work. As we privilege the avant-garde, Nourse takes a backseat in the inevitable comparison to Mary Cassatt, who like Nourse spent her career in France and favored subjects from domestic life. Because of Cassatt’s association with the French impressionists, her urban subject matter, and the dissonance of some of her depictions, she is one for the survey books—while Nourse is forgotten.2 Yet a stodgy academic realist Nourse was not. After her prescient 1888 debut at the Salon of the Société Nationale des Artistes Français, she participated only one more time, in 1889. In 1890, she accepted an invitation to exhibit with a group of more progressive artists frustrated with Salon politics, including Charles Cazin and Auguste Rodin. From then forward, Nourse was a regular at the new Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, to which she was elected to membership. Once confident that without the endorsement of the establishment she could support herself and her sister Louise, her stalwart companion, Nourse freely explored fresh avenues in her work. Nourse was a devout Catholic whose humanitarian inclinations were the basis for her subjects from the start. She spent the summers of 1884–86 making sketches and watercolors in the Tennessee mountains, where she portrayed the residents engaged in skillful work. These and sensitive oil studies of Black children announced her devotion to the unsentimental depiction of hardworking and disadvantaged people, with an appreciation for their beauty and compassion for the challenges they faced. After her relocation to Paris in 1887 and three months at the Académie Julian, Nourse naturally gravitated to the European peasant subjects that preoccupied countless artists of her day, from the tradition-bound to the avant-garde. Somewhat reclusive and a serious worker, Nourse sought out quiet locales away from other painters and tourists. She was drawn to the religious rituals and spiritual lives of Breton women and other communities she visited. Her depictions of mothers and children, though not explicitly religious, evoke the sanctity she found in daily acts of nurturing. Nourse approached her work with a sense of adventure. Portrayals of maternity and country life dominate her oeuvre, but not to the exclusion of portraits, landscapes, and stilllife arrangements. She adored working on paper as much as canvas and earned recognition for her drawings, watercolors, and pastels, sometimes more than for her paintings. She embraced each work as an individual expression, and her restless experimentation makes it difficult to compartmentalize her style. Meandering formally and technically, she drew inspiration from a wide range of artwork. The First Communion (La première communion) of 52

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figure 28 Elizabeth Nourse, The First Communion (La première communion), 1895. Oil on canvas, 63 × 57 in. Cincinnati Art Museum. Museum purchase: John J. Emery Endowment and Bequest of Mr. and Mrs. Walter J. Wichgar, 2013.13.

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1895 echoes Whistler in the refined construction of its composition, reduction to simple shapes, and restrained palette. While the vivid brushwork in the girls’ spectacular white dresses may owe something to the influence of Sargent and others, the charming narrative created through poses and facial expressions is all Nourse. Also in 1895, she made Summer Hours (Les heures d’été), a more abstract and intensely colored painting that engages with impressionism and post-impressionism. Two women sewing en plein air, dressed in shades of pink, plum, and blue, are seated in the shade of a tree with a broad swath of vivid yellow grass behind them and a strip of green forest along the top of the canvas. The flattening of space and decorative qualities are even more emphatic in Returning from Church, Penmarc’h (Rentrant de l’église, Penmarc’h; private collection, 1900),3 in which the designs of the figures’ elaborate clothing line up with horizontal bands of color in the landscape. Between Summer Hours and Returning from Church, Penmarc’h, Nourse painted the unstructured Grandfather’s Birthday (La fête de grand-père; ca. 1897, Cincinnati Art Museum) with muted pastel hues, loose handling, and a textured paint surface. We see similar variation in Nourse’s drawings. In eighteen sketchbooks, she takes us on a journey, avidly recording the special qualities of place, culture, and costume on her extensive travels with Louise.4 Early descriptive drawings with a traditional approach to shading give way in the 1890s to examples that display a light hand and economy of line. On some sheets, lines expressively widen and taper; on others, they trace the artist’s free, looping movements. On both paper and canvas, the artist blunted edges, emphasizing rounded contours and organic shapes. The rhythmic repetition of figures and heads was a favorite motif, as was the intimacy between sisters, perhaps a tribute to her familial relations. The pastel and charcoal drawing of a sisterly embrace, The Kiss (La baiser; ca. 1906, Clark Art Institute), reveals an emotional intensity rarely associated with the artist. After the turn of the century, Nourse more frequently depicted middle- or upper-class women engaged in domestic pursuits in elegant interiors. She brought her own viewpoint to these subjects that were fashionable with American impressionists like Childe Hassam and collectors in the United States, where her work sold well. In The Open Window (La fênetre ouverte; ca. 1913, University of Cincinnati Fine Arts Collection), the artist expressed a quiet moment of companionship between a woman sewing and a young girl who watches her. Nourse’s enjoyment of pictorial challenges is evident in this work in which indoors and outdoors merge. The lighting effects, assertive dappling of the leaves beyond the large windows, and reflections in the glass and on a tabletop make complex work of a commonplace subject. The actions of light always fascinated Nourse, who frequently painted nocturnes. She explored filtered light in The Closed Shutters (Les volets clos; 1910, Musée d’Orsay), a painting of a woman standing at a bureau acquired for the French governmental art collection. How does art history’s division of artists into stylistic camps contribute to who is forgotten or remembered? Would identifying Nourse as an impressionist make her less “forgettable”? Even before her death, Mary L. Alexander, the longtime columnist for the Cincinnati Enquirer, noted that “Miss Nourse in painting her similar [maternal] themes adhered to the older tonal school; Miss Cassatt embraced the higher keyed palette of the impressionists.”5 54

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figure 29 Elizabeth Nourse, Summer Hours (Les heures d’été), ca. 1924. Oil on canvas, 53 ½ × 43 ³/₈ in. The Newark Museum of Art. Gift of Mrs. Florence P. Eagleton, 1925, 25.851.

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Described in her time as a traditionalist and realist, Nourse garnered high praise for her works’ quiet certainty and emotional resonance, as well as for her broad and assured technique, which critics deemed manly. A closer look reveals much more. NOTES 1.  The former was co-organized by the National Gallery in London, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the latter with the American Federation of Arts. Catalogues are cited below. 2.  Compared in Lois Marie Fink, “Elizabeth Nourse: Painting the Motif of Humanity,” in Mary Alice Heekin Burke, Elizabeth Nourse (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983), 114. 3.  On long-term loan to the Cincinnati Museum. 4.  Sixteen sketchbooks are at the Cincinnati Art Museum and two at the Cincinnati Museum Center, institutions that also have Nourse papers. 5.  Mary L. Alexander, “The Week in Art Circles,” Cincinnati Enquirer, August 2, 1931, 72.

FOR FURTHER READING Adler, Kathleen, Erica Hirshler, and H. Barbara Weinberg. Americans in Paris 1860–1900. London: National Gallery, 2006. Burke, Mary Alice Heekin, and Lois Marie Fink. Elizabeth Nourse, 1859–1938: A Salon Career. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983. Includes a catalogue raisonné. Madeline, Laurence, et al. Women Artists in Paris 1850–1900. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press with American Federation of Arts, 2017.

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DERRICK CARTWRIGHT

ELLA FERRIS PELL b. 1846, St. Louis, Missouri d. 1922, Bacon, New York

Ella Ferris Pell: Regretting and Forgetting

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ETWEEN 1870 AND 1895 , Ella Ferris Pell’s career flourished. Born

to a well-off family, she enjoyed opportunities to study and travel while young.1 Pell profited from years of art instruction, first in New York and later in Paris. As early as 1880, she worked as a sculptor, illustrator, and painter of literary subjects. By age fifty, the artist had exhibited in the most prestigious venues of her era: the Paris Salon, the National Academy of Design in New York, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and numerous other showcases. Pell’s works were routinely praised, frequently reproduced, and ultimately found their way into collections of civic institutions across the country. Additionally, she occupied leadership roles in multiple progressive organizations that promoted contemporary women’s place in artistic circles. After enjoying this extended phase of public success, for reasons that are not entirely clear, Pell’s reputation stagnated and then plummeted. She speculated briefly in real estate before moving into a succession of ever-smaller homes in the Hudson River Valley. Her efforts there failed to earn much attention. Disconnected from the art world of New York City and, to a curious degree, separated from her family, Pell lived in ever-deepening isolation and disenchantment. She died alone and was buried in a modest grave at the Fishkill Rural Cemetery, near 57

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Beacon. In recent years, her work has drawn the attention of academics set on recovering the contributions of American women artists, but apart from one singular, and haunting, representation that has attracted repeated analysis, her wider achievements remain unheralded. What happened to Ella Ferris Pell? From the moment of her enrollment at Cooper Union’s School of Design for Women, the artist became familiar with celebration. William Rimmer (1816–79), who directed that program from 1866 to 1870, promoted Pell’s gifts as a carver of medallions and as a monumental sculptor. In 1869, a critic singled out her Andromeda in an exhibition of student works, calling it “especially worthy of mention for its fineness of pose and strength of modeling.”2 Three-dimensional works by Pell, while counted among her belongings at the end of her life, survive only in photographs. The next phase of Pell’s creative pursuits is better documented. She traveled with her older sister and brother-in-law, Eveline (Evie) and Charles Todd, throughout Europe and North Africa on a voyage that stretched from September 1872 to November 1878. A trio of sketchbooks and stack of diaries reflect those explorations and provided inspiration for Pell’s later compositions.3 During the 1880s, the artist’s professional contributions consisted mainly of illustration work. Pell designed holiday cards for Louis Prang & Co., and the Boston lithographer routinely listed her name among the firm’s top artists. Her original designs have since vanished, but surviving cards demonstrate a flair for dramatic staging. Pell also appeared among the handful of other women who showed regularly at the Salmagundi Sketch Club’s annual “Black and White” exhibitions. She thought enough of her drawings to ask highly competitive prices for them. References to oil paintings appear infrequently in this decade, however, even as her success as a commercial artist grew steadily.4 Her progress as a draftsperson was well documented in new mass-market periodicals, where Pell’s work regularly appeared in reproduction, and she earned further national recognition illustrating gift books, notably Paul Tyner’s theosophical novel Through the Invisible: A Love Story (1897). Around 1889, Pell revisited Europe, choosing Paris as her base this time around. She was then forty-three years old, but like many younger American art students, she took lessons from leading French academicians. Studying with Jean-Paul Laurens (1838–1921), JacquesFernand Humbert (1842–1934), and Gaston Casimir Saint-Pierre (1833–1916) for the better part of two years, Pell’s instructional alliances paid off with several works accepted for display at the Salons of 1889 and 1890. Upon returning to New York, her Salon entries, The Angel Making Adam See the Consequences of His Sin (location unknown) and Salomé, earned additional displays. Pell showed Adam at the National Academy of Design, where it was dubbed a “daring picture” in contrast to the “refined and delicate-looking woman” who painted it.5 Salomé generated still greater response. A critical triumph, considered by some her “finest general achievement,” the dramatically illuminated, single-figure composition depicts a seminude female, the New Testament princess who demanded the head of John the Baptist, lost in thought. Indeed, if any work had a lasting effect on Pell’s reputation, it was this enigmatic image. The trope of an introspective, solitary protagonist appeared repeatedly throughout her career. Salomé was shown on numerous occasions over the next five 58

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figure 30 Attributed to Ella Ferris Pell, He Is Risen!, 1883. Chromolithograph. Timken Museum of Art, San Diego, California.

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figure 31 Ella Ferris Pell, Salomé, 1890. Oil on canvas, 52 × 34 in. Timken Museum of Art, San Diego, California. Gift of Sandra and Bram Dijkstra.

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figure 32 Unidentified photographer, Ella Ferris Pell, n.d. Signal Photos/Alamy Stock Photo.

years, and discussion followed it at each venue. In 1896, the painting was acquired by the Boston Art Club for its permanent collection.6 In the years bracketing these achievements, Pell remained visible in New York art circles. She lectured and spoke on behalf of women artists in her roles as president of the Liberal Art League and vice president of the Ladies’ Art Association, competed for prominent public art commissions, received visitors at the Van Dyck Building studio space she shared with her sister, and took summer trips to Catskill resorts that were duly tracked in the city’s social columns. As if foretelling Pell’s changing fortunes, her own self-descriptions shifted from fine artist and illustrator to portrait painter around this time. She still produced religious scenes—including a figurative composition called Agnes Dei, sold to the Columbus Museum of Art in 1899—but increasingly she made her living by painting likenesses. Toward the end of her career, she advertised her services painting “portraits in oil from photographs” for prices starting at fifteen dollars (or eighteen dollars including the frame). Pell quit New York City in 1905, after publicly contemplating a move up the Hudson River Valley the year before. She settled into a succession of ever-more-modest households ELLA FERRIS PELL

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in Fishkill-on-Hudson and Beacon. Glimpses of her final seventeen years can be traced through occasional letters to the editor in local newspapers and ads promoting her annual Christmas sales of “paintings and bric-a-brac” in local storefronts. A rare photograph of Pell from this period shows her unsmiling, darkly dressed, and bent over her work holding a pencil or brush. An account of her solitary death, announced on the front page of the Beacon Daily Herald, included a lengthy description of this “prominent citizen” who was “a familiar figure around the streets of the city . . . and who had the bearing of a colonial aristocrat.” The same article went on to observe that “it was felt by those who knew her best that a touch of sadness darkened her unusually brilliant life. It is believed to have been in connection with family ties that the woman bore unflinchingly through her life a wounded heart.”7 The unresolved, tragic image Pell left behind has been redeemed by a long, if episodic, afterlife in art history. Pell is still most often invoked in relation to her most contentious work, Salomé. That scholarly interest has been driven by speculative debates about the picture’s fundamental ambiguity and the derivations of its sexual power. Bram Dijkstra, for example, has memorably interpreted Pell’s heroine in terms of her stark difference from how male artists approached the same iconography, seeing the work as “radically at variance with the prevailing mode” of femme fatale imagery.8 The ideas generated by such reevaluations have proved to be unquestionably impactful. This artist, whose works were once slated for deaccessioning, has become a burgeoning source of institutional pride. Exhibitions feature Pell’s contributions as a feminist, and Salomé once again is a centerpiece of international traveling displays. Without this interplay of revisionism mixed with the lasting mystery of the image itself, one wonders if Pell would be remembered at all. Her transcending image, as Holland Cotter recently observed in the New York Times, “has the commanding glamour of a theater poster.”9 In our contemporary mode, we confront this image with a long list of questions about its maker’s motivations. Like the artist who painted her, Salomé has become an emblem of solitary self-reflection, tinged with unnamable regret. NOTES 1.  Pell’s family history is vague. She never married and left no heirs. She was the daughter of George Coffin Barney and Susan Pell. After her parents’ divorce, teenaged Ella rejected her father’s name and used her mother’s maiden name exclusively. I am grateful to Sandra and Bram Dijkstra for sharing their extensive research files on the arist. I also wish to acknowledge Mark Lucas of the Beacon [NY] Historical Society for guiding me to the local newspaper resources in which Pell figured prominently. 2.  “Fine Arts,” Evening Post, May 28, 1869. 3.  Three large-format sketchbooks totaling more than 250 sheets document this extended trip (coll. Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College). Most images are landscapes, carefully dated and annotated, which provide an itinerary of Pell’s travels. Her travel diaries are now at the Fort Ticonderoga Museum. 4.  The Black and White Exhibition at the Salmagundi, in 1887, included A Slave of the Harem, which Pell priced at $75; see The Salmagundi Club and American Black and White Society, Ninth Annual Exhibition (New York: Salmagundi Club, 1887), 18. 5.  “Women’s Work in the Academy-VI,” The World, December 9, 1891, 9. 6.  Interestingly, Pell herself balked at the image’s celebrity, calling it “not the greatest [but still] I consider

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it one of my Important works. . . . The Picture represents Salomé at the moment when she first discovers the head of John the Baptist. The purely physical nature of Salomé revolts against the ugliness of the decapitated head” (“Women’s Work in the Academy-VI,” 9.) This description cuts across recent interpretations of Salomé as a figure full of agency. The painting sold for $800; see “Art Purchase,” Evening Post, December 19, 1896, 8. 7.  “Miss Ella F. Pell Well Known Artist Found Dead in Apartments on Ferry Street,” Beacon Daily Herald, November 6, 1922, 1. 8.  Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 390. Numerous scholars have taken up Dijkstra’s arguments about Salomé. For example, see Lawrence Kramer, “Culture and Musical Hermeneutics: The Salomé Complex,” Cambridge Opera Journal 2 (November 1990): 294; Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking Books, 1990), 145–161; Gail P. Streete, The Salomé Project: Salomé and Her Afterlives (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2018), 11. 9.  Holland Cotter, “An Era of Exotic Mirages,” New York Times, August 11, 2000, B29.

FOR FURTHER READING Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Edwards, Holly, et al. Noble Dreams and Wicked Pleasures: Orientalism in America 1870–1930. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, and Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, 2000. Snow, Megan A. “The Unexpected Symbol of the New Woman: Ella Ferris Pell’s Salome.” Master’s thesis, Brigham Young University, 2017.

ELLA FERRIS PELL

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SCOTT A. SHIELDS

THEODORE WORES b. 1859, San Francisco, California d. 1939, San Francisco, California

Theodore Wores: International and Californian

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NATIVE SAN FRANCISCAN , Theodore Wores painted the people,

landscapes, architecture, and gardens of Japan, England, Hawaii, Samoa, and Spain, as well as portraits, genre scenes, and landscapes in California. Though today Wores is little known outside the Golden State, he was, in his own time, considered “one of America’s leading artists.”1 Wores began his artistic training in his hometown, first privately under Joseph Harrington and then, at fifteen, under Virgil Williams at the newly opened California School of Design. Later that year, he traveled to Munich to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, where, despite his youth, he won multiple awards and developed friendships with Frank Duveneck, William Merritt Chase, John Twachtman, John White Alexander, and others. In 1880, he accompanied artists from this group to Venice and met James McNeill Whistler, whom he later befriended in London. Upon his return to San Francisco in 1881, Wores began a series of paintings of Chinatown, located just three blocks from his studio. He also gave painting lessons to residents there, going so far as to try to learn Cantonese to better facilitate his instruction. Additionally, he taught at San Francisco’s newly formed Art Students League. Chinese Restaurant (1884) is one of a small number of Wores’s surviving Chinatown paintings; several 64

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such canvases, along with other works, were lost in the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire. The series incorporated architecture but focused primarily on people, including vendors, musicians, elegantly dressed children, and even mourners at a funeral. Chinese Restaurant is typical in its attention to detail, depicting individuals and their clothing, food, musical instruments, and décor (with legible text carved into the background screen), all painted with accuracy and care. Works like this one belied widely held perceptions that Chinatown was unsavory, as a review in the San Franciscan suggests: “Not satisfied with the glory he has already gained by defying the bad smells, smallpox and highbinders of our pleasant Chinese quarter, Wores is still digging deeper into the interesting mine of subjects he has found there.”2 His portrayals also stood in opposition to the stereotypical and racist depictions prevalent in the popular press, which had intensified because of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, a federal law that prohibited Chinese immigration and made those already in the country ineligible for naturalization. Wores deemed it critical to get to know the people and places he painted, and when he moved to find new subjects he would stay for months or even years. An early Wores biographer wrote, “He became acquainted with the people, their history, atmosphere and traditions.”3 This process of discovery drew him to Japan, the first of his two extended trips starting in March 1885. There, in his words, he settled, “ ‘far from the madding crowd’—the foreigners at least,” taking “a little Japanese house in the outskirts of Tokio” as “the first foreigner who has ever lived in this district.”4 He also availed himself of opportunities to interact with local artists, finding himself “bound together [with them] by mutual sympathies and common ideals.”5 Wores stayed in Japan nearly three years, producing approximately one hundred paintings, mostly of outdoor subjects with gardens and architecture. For some of these, he hired local craftspeople to make the frames, which ranged from bamboo with lacquered ornamentation to carved wood with motifs derived from the art itself. Most of the paintings included people, almost always in traditional dress—which, at the time, to Wores’s chagrin, was fast giving way to European styles as mandated by royal decree.6 When Wores returned to the United States in 1887, he exhibited his paintings of Japan around the country. He lived for a time in New York, renting a space in the Tenth Street Studio Building, near the studio of William Merritt Chase. The New York Herald called him a “welcome addition” to the art community and a person of “keen observation, of sound workmanship and exceptional artistic spirit and talent.”7 In April 1889, he moved on to London and there became a friend of Whistler, who, along with Oscar Wilde, was instrumental in helping him find venues to exhibit his work. He ultimately showed at prestigious English galleries, as well as at the Royal Academy of Arts, of which he became a member. In 1890, he exhibited two works at the Paris Salon. He also helped found England’s Chelsea Arts Club, which accorded him a farewell party, with Whistler as host, when Wores returned to San Francisco in 1891. Wores was in San Francisco only a year before returning to Japan. This time, he stayed until 1894. On this second trip, he pursued many of the same themes, though the paintings had become more overtly impressionist, his brushwork looser, and his colors more pastel. Among his favorite subjects were the iris gardens of Horikiri, Tokyo, which allowed him to exploit an almost pointillist approach. THEODORE WORES

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figure 33 Theodore Wores, Chinese Restaurant, 1884. Oil on canvas, 32 ½ × 22 in. Crocker Art Museum. Museum purchase made possible by Louise and Victor Graf with contributions from Simon K. Chiu, Denise and Donald Timmons, Nancy Lawrence and Gordon Klein, Linda Lawrence, Anne and Malcolm McHenry, Janet Mohle-Boetani and Mark Manasse, Marcy Friedman, Nancy and Dennis Marks, and Eleanor Matranga, 2015.1. Scuttlebutte, photo provided by Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons, Share Alike 4.0 License.

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figure 34 Theodore Wores, The Iris Flowers of Hori Kiri, Tokio, ca. 1893. Oil on panel, 15 ¾ × 19 ⁷/₈ in. Crocker Art Museum. Museum purchase, with funds provided by Gerald D. Gordon, 2009.47. In The Loop, photo provided by Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons License.

After returning to California, Wores produced portraits and scenes of the coast. In 1901, he went to Hawaii and stayed a year, painting landscapes and depictions of Hawaiian life, along with portraits of government officials. His painting The Lei Maker later won a gold medal at the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle. From Hawaii, he continued to the Samoan Islands. On his way home in 1902, he exhibited ninety works in Honolulu, the Hawaiian Star reporting its admiration for his “careful and continued study of the Hawaiian and Samoan life and character.”8 After a brief stay in San Francisco, he made an extended visit to Spain, painting the architecture and gardens of Seville and Granada. After his home and studio burned in the San Francisco fire of 1906, Wores moved to Los Angeles. When he returned north, he began teaching at the reopened San Francisco Institute of Art (formerly Mark Hopkins Institute of Art) and, shortly thereafter, became its dean. He was chosen for his open-mindedness and impressionist approach, a rebuke to former dean Arthur Mathews, a militant tonalist. Wores was considered the more progressive artist, having pursued impressionism since the late nineteenth century, before most Californians had embraced the style. THEODORE WORES

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figure 35 Theodore Wores, The Lei Maker, 1901. Oil on canvas, 35 ⁷/₈ × 29 in. Honolulu Museum of Art. Gift of Drs. Ben and A. Jess Shenson, 1986, 5490.1.

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Because teaching curbed his travels, Wores painted regional landscapes with sand dunes and wildflowers, as well as locales up and down the state. He also painted gardens, often—as in Monterey and Santa Barbara—in combination with historic adobes and mission buildings that communicated a sense of California’s Spanish and Mexican heritage. As in Japan, he felt history’s loss deeply. This was likewise true of subjects he painted in Canada, after he resigned from the San Francisco Institute of Art in 1913. In Canada, he began a series of paintings with Native American themes, which he continued two years later when he went to New Mexico and Arizona. He exhibited fifty-three paintings from these trips at the Century Association in New York, a reviewer calling his depictions of Native American subjects “a corrective for impressions which other painters have created,” Wores’s being handled “with a well-trained and sympathetic brush.”9 Late in his career, Wores focused less on people and architecture than on landscape, though this too evidenced a human presence. He became well known for depicting the orchards of Santa Clara County, and, starting in 1926, the gardens around his home there. The Saratoga property, a converted Methodist church, started out as a weekend and summer residence, but he later lived there year-round. By this time, Wores’s art and personal views were conservative by modernist standards, though his position within the art community— and at San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, of which he was a longtime member—had not diminished. His permanent relocation to Saratoga was in part to escape a controversy he helped create at the club, when he and other members of the art committee drew a line “between what is and what is not art” and refused to show modern “horrors which offend the eye and shock the intellect.”10 The decision prompted indignant protests and mirrored a larger discord between San Francisco’s conservative and progressive artists. Wores nevertheless remained firm in his commitment to representational painting, pursuing it until failing eyesight prompted his return to San Francisco, where he died in 1939. NOTES 1.  Edith Knight Homes, “San Francisco Artist Will Give Exhibit in Portland This Week,” Sunday Oregonian, October 19, 1913. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer called him “one of the greatest painters in America.” “Hotel and Club,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer, August 9, 1913. 2.  Midas, “The Artists,” The San Franciscan, September 20, 1884. 3.  Gene Hailey, ed., “Theodore Wores,” California Art Research Monographs 10 (San Francisco: Works Progress Administration, 1937), 104. 4.  Theodore Wores, quoted in “Art Notes,” The Argonaut, April 9, 1887. 5.  Theodore Wores, “An American Artist in Japan,” The Century Magazine 38 (September 1889): 682. 6.  “Art Notes.” 7.  New York Herald, quoted in Japan Weekly Mail 9 (June 2, 1888): 505. 8.  “South Sea Canvases,” Hawaiian Star (Honolulu), April 10, 1902. 9.  New York World, quoted in Anna Cora Winchell, “Artists and Their Work,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 17, 1918. 10.  Haig Patigian, quoted in “Bohemians Torn over Art,” New York Times, February 20, 1927.

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REDISCOVERING THE MODERN FIGURE

DURING THE 1900s ,

“modern art” presupposed a concern for cubism, abstract expressionism, minimalism, or other late-century styles. Meanwhile, figurative imagery was often eclipsed by issues of abstraction. In some camps, realistic depictions of the human form were deemed oldfashioned, which perhaps accounts for the relative obscurity of many traditional artists. Of course, the human figure didn’t disappear as a subject, and neither did pictorial traditions, although they might find different expressions in different times and places, as evidenced in this selection. Subjects might be drawn from history or literature, but they could also come from issues in contemporary life, such as a concern for “social realism.” Works featuring subjects beyond the traditional white and Eurocentric motifs grew more evident, as did their makers, which included growing numbers of women and artists of color. This new diversity was slow to win attention in chronicles of the nation’s art history; their previous neglect accounts, in part, for their increased prominence today, evident in these selections and in the culture at large. Traditional interest in life drawing and the nude continued, with examples ranging from the neoclassical to modern styles. The artists included here are linked by their concern for figurative subjects, notwithstanding differences in style; most models are human, but a few other vertebrates are represented, a menagerie that includes a goat, a puma, and an angora cat cunningly posed as a feline Maja.

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ANNA MARLEY

ELIZABETH SPARHAWK-JONES b. 1885, Baltimore, Maryland d. 1968, location unknown; buried, Sparks, Baltimore County, Maryland

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of the most talented artists to come out of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts at the turn of the twentieth century, yet only a handful of collectors, curators, dealers, and scholars today know anything about her and her work. Why? It was not that she lacked an artistic network. At PAFA she was one of the more than five hundred women students to study portraiture with William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) and cast drawing with Thomas Anshutz (1851–1912). She was close friends with several women artists who were her contemporaries, including Lilla Cabot Perry (1848–1933), Alice Kent Stoddard (1883–1976), and Marianna Sloan (1875–1954). She was a lover of Morton Schamberg (1881–1918) and a classmate of Charles Sheeler (1883–1965), both of whom she studied with at PAFA. Horace Pippin (1888–1946) and Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) were her near neighbors and colleagues in West Chester County, and Robert Henri (1865–1929) and Marsden Hartley (1877–1943) were part of her artistic circle of friends in New York. Nor was she lacking in prizes and art-world acclaim. She twice won the Mary Smith Prize, given for the best painting by a woman in PAFA’s annual exhibition. The first time was for Roller Skating (1908, location LIZABETH SPARHAWK-JONES IS ONE

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figure 36 Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, The Market, ca. 1905. Oil on canvas, 35 × 133 in. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Commissioned by the Pennsylvania Academy, 1909.10.

unknown) and the second for In the Spring (1912, Des Moines Art Center), whose subject is the millinery department at Wanamaker’s Department Store in Philadelphia. Many of her stunning paintings from the 1910s are currently unlocated, including The Veil Counter (1910), one of the first of a group of four known Wanamaker’s scenes. The Art Institute of Chicago is lucky to own two of these paintings, Shop Girls and Shoe Shop, both painted in Philadelphia. These Wanamaker’s paintings focus on the young professional women—the shopgirls—who served the wealthy shoppers. Her focus on these figures—like her, young women making their way in a professional consumer marketplace—is unique in her empathic depiction of the “girls.” Elizabeth Carlson has persuasively compared her work to that of her male contemporary William Glackens, who similarly depicted scenes at Wanamaker’s, but centered his attention on upper-class women shoppers, rather than workers. Sparhawk-Jones certainly did not lack an assured and bravado painting technique. In a 1964 oral history for the Archives of American Art, when asked how she achieved her freedom of line, she answered, “Well, because I’m naturally very free of mind, I’m not prescribed, I have no place that says thus far and no further in me.” I think that Chase supported the expression of this freedom of mind in Sparhawk-Jones’s painting technique, as he did for many women artists he taught. I would like to briefly explore three paintings that exhibit this freedom of mind and freedom of brush. What I love about all three of these paintings is that they are completely devoted to the spaces and relationships of women. The Market, done when she was a student at PAFA, is painted alla prima with an Old Master–inspired palette of browns and creams. It monumentalizes women’s labor. A market woman, hand on hip, is the center of the horizontal composition, and groups of women are spread out in a pyramidal composition behind her, creating a frieze-like composition. Women chat, smile, and exchange foodstuffs, an appropriate theme for the PAFA women’s dining area, the destination for which this painting was commissioned. In Rittenhouse Square, a much more particularized view of women’s labor, includes women of different classes interacting, or not, as the case may be. A nursemaid with a domestic 74

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figure 37 Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, In Rittenhouse Square, ca. 1909. Oil on canvas, 30 × 36 in. Courtesy of Avery Galleries, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania.

servant cap and nondescript gray coat sits on a snowy bench, looking intently into one of the two carriages beside her; another woman, in a fur coat, seems to cast a side eye at her. Is the well-clad woman walking her own child in a pram and turning to look at the nursemaid? Or is the seated woman taking care of two charges? It is unclear. But what is clear is the specific demarcation of social class and difference of the two women interacting with each other in a fashionable urban space. The artist captures something in this interaction that few of her male contemporaries would—the sense of judgment one woman can impart on another with just a slight tilt of the head, a raise of an eyebrow, or a shadowy backward glance. To my mind, Shop Girls seems almost autobiographical, a professional self-portrait and painterly manifesto in the guise of a depiction of women working in Wanamaker’s. As with In Rittenhouse Square, the paint surface is luscious, free, and very painterly. In the oral history quoted above, Sparhawk-Jones said that “everything is abstract. [Velázquez] is abstract.” When she is considered at all, Sparhawk-Jones has been described as an impressionist painter with “Ashcan School” subject matter. But her visual references to the painterly ELIZABETH SPARHAWK-JONES

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figure 38 Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, Shop Girls, ca. 1912. Oil on canvas, 38 × 48 in. The Art Institute of Chicago. Friends of American Art Collection, 1912.1677. Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, New York.

abstraction of Diego Velázquez (1599–1660) can clearly be seen in this canvas. As the shopgirls cut and handle bolts of cloth, I am reminded of his famous Spinners (ca. 1656, Prado)— at once a depiction of women at work and an allegory of art and craft. This Wanamaker’s painting is Sparhawk-Jones’s allegory. The shopgirls cut cloth as the painter paints canvas. The detail of the central girl’s deft hand firmly holding flashing silver scissors and cutting through swaths of paint is all you need to see to know that Sparhawk-Jones is a great painter, working in the manner of her teacher William Merritt Chase and other great, painterly artists like Gilbert Stuart (1755–1828), Édouard Manet (1832–83), and yes, even Velázquez. Her shopgirl is, like Velázquez’s spinner, a master artist. She imbues her shopgirls with a deep sense of professionalism, which she herself exuded as a precocious talent. So, why don’t we all know the work of Sparhawk-Jones? The simplest answer is that she was a woman and, like the vast majority of successful women artists from the early twentieth century, ignored by the art world. But in the case of Sparhawk-Jones, gender was also detrimental to her career: in about 1913, at the height of her success, she withdrew from the art world to take care of her mother. Moreover, she suffered from a mental illness that re76

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moved her from the artist’s spotlight. Sparhawk-Jones did not return to art making until the 1930s, after years of hospitalization. Like many professional women in the period who lacked a supportive family or inherited wealth, she faced difficult life choices that had a deleterious effect on her career, despite her innate talent, her fine training, and her professional connections. FOR FURTHER READING Carlson, Elizabeth. “The Girl behind the Counter: Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones and the Modern Shop Girl.” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 5, no. 5 (2019). Smith, Barbara Lehman. Sparhawk-Jones: The Artist Who Lived Twice. Denver, CO: Outskirts Press, 2010.

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RENÉE ATER

META WARRICK FULLER b. 1877, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania d. 1968, Framingham, Massachusetts

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known of the achievements of Meta Warrick Fuller. Since the early twentieth century, she has been acknowledged as an important artist of the race.1 Her early work (1899–1910) was aligned with the symbolist movement and the artist’s desire to unveil the intangible psychological realm through three-dimensional form. After a 1910 fire destroyed much of this work, she shifted her attention to representations that sensitively embodied blackness and visually narrated Black history. She marched for women’s right to vote, lobbied against the showing of the white supremacist film The Birth of a Nation (1915), dealt visually and psychically with the lynching of Black men and women, and was a peace advocate who critiqued U.S. involvement in World War I. She may be obscured in standard histories of American art, but she was never missing. As an undergraduate at Oberlin College, I discovered Fuller while examining another artist. My first art history paper focused on Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907), the noted neoclassical sculptor. Both artists received attention in publications by Black authors that I used for my research: Alain Locke’s Negro Art: Past and Present (1936), James A. Porter’s Modern Negro Art (1943), Samella Lewis’s African American Art (1978), and David Driskell’s Two Centuries of Black American Art (1976) FRICAN AMERICAN HISTORIANS HAVE ALWAYS

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figure 39 Unidentified photographer, Meta Warrick Fuller, ca. 1919. History and Art Collection/Alamy Stock Photo. © Dr. John L. Fuller.

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figure 40 Meta Warrick Fuller, Ethiopia Awakening, 1921. Bronze, 67 × 16 × 29 in. Art and Artifacts Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, The New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations. Image: Schomburg Center, NYPL/Art Resource, New York. © Dr. John L. Fuller.

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and Hidden Heritage (1985). I would continue to encounter Fuller in such important exhibition catalogues as Mary Schmidt Campbell’s Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America (1987) and Jontyle Theresa Robinson’s Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists (1996). These Black cultural critics, art historians, and curators laid a path for my future engagement with Fuller. As I moved toward a dissertation topic in the late 1990s, Fuller seemed to be everywhere I looked—visible but tantalizingly elusive. I wanted a dissertation topic that would allow me to press against the American art canon, which I believe marginalized Black and Brown artists, particularly women. Two important exhibitions influenced my decision to write a monograph on a woman artist: Leslie King-Hammond and Tritobia Hayes Benjamin’s 3 Generations of African American Women Sculptors: A Study in Paradox (1996) and Rick Powell and David Bailey’s Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance (1997). Both highlighted Fuller, albeit in differing ways. I saw the 3 Generations exhibition in Philadelphia soon after it opened. Shown along with eleven other Black women sculptors, Fuller was represented by several small sculptures and the full-size Ethiopia Awakening in bronze. With May Howard Jackson, Fuller served as a middle generation in the exhibition, located between Edmonia Lewis and artists such as Augusta Savage and Selma Burke. King-Hammond and Benjamin provided invaluable sources in their catalogue essay that helped me to begin my research and untangle the history and meaning of Ethiopia Awakening and Fuller’s life more expansively. Powell’s essay on the rebirth of the Harlem Renaissance in Rhapsodies in Black argued for understanding Fuller’s Ethiopia Awakening (1921) as “a spirited message of rebirth and self-realization” (12). I was intrigued with the way in which this scuplture played center stage in the narration of Fuller’s artistic career; it is an object that has long been read as a sign of Pan-African ideals. I wondered what I might discover if I began to dig deeper. Expanding on the work of these scholars dedicated to Black artists required me to dive into the archive. This archive did not come from mainstream white art institutions or libraries, for Fuller is largely absent in these repositories. Instead, I found Fuller in the archive of Black life and history represented in the collections of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, the Archives of Livingstone College (a historically Black college), and the Library of Congress’s National Urban League records, NAACP records, and W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. I dug through Black newspapers and journals (The Crisis and Opportunity), finding the artist hailed for her talent. Similar to an archaeologist sifting through the strata of earth to find the remains of the past, I began to find the remains of her career and life in this Black archive and to see an artist with greater breadth than I had previously perceived. Like so many American artists before her, Fuller traveled to Paris, attending the Académie Colarossi from 1899 to 1902. She met W. E. B. Du Bois during the 1900 Paris Exposition; early on, he supported her work and promoted her as race artist. In 1902, she visited Auguste Rodin at his studio in Meudon. Similar to her compatriots, Fuller was forever transformed by Rodin’s emotive and sensual modern aesthetic. His direct influence can be seen in META WARRICK FULLER

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figure 41 Meta Warrick Fuller, The Wretched, 1902. Bronze, 17 × 21 × 15 in. Collection of Maryhill Museum of Art. Gift of Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, 1951.07.264. © Dr. John L. Fuller.

her handling of form and content. While in Paris, she also came to the attention of the dealer-connoisseur Siegfried Bing, who held a solo exhibition of her work in his Paris gallery, L’Art Nouveau Bing. One critic noted that her work in the show had “a sense of form, originality of vision, tranquil audacity, and expressive force.”2 At the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts in April 1903, she showed two works and received praise for her “masterly ex82

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pression of strange and original thought.”3 I briefly trace Fuller’s time in Paris because she was embraced as an artist there, recognized for the unique quality of her symbolist-inflected work. Upon return to the United States, Fuller faced the real obstacles of racism and exclusion that shaped the early twentieth-century art world, and she navigated the difficult class expectations of Black womanhood. Yet she continued to make art and eventually turned, later in life, to poetry as her expressive medium. Looking back on my engagement with Fuller, I realize that I have sought to amplify her sculpture and to underscore her significance as a Black artist in a time when restrictions based on race, gender, and class prevented many from pursuing such a career. I did not reclaim her in the traditional sense because she has always been present in Black histories. NOTES 1.  See, for example, H. Harrison Wayman, “Meta Vaux Warrick (Sculptress),” Colored American Magazine 6, no. 5 (1903): 325–331; Florence Lewis Bentley, “Meta Warrick: A Promising Sculptor,” Voice of the Negro 4 (March 1907): 116–118; William Francis O’Donnell, “Meta Vaux Warrick, Sculptor of Horrors: The Negro Girl Whose Productions Are Being Compared to Rodin’s,” World To-Day 13, no. 5 (1907): 1139–1145; Benjamin Brawley, “Meta Warrick Fuller,” Southern Workman 47 (January 1918): 25–32; Benjamin Brawley, The Negro in Literature and Art in the United States (New York: Duffield, 1918), 112–124. 2.  Oeuvres de Mlle Meta Warrick, Sculpteur, Exposées à l’Art Nouveau Bing, Paris, June 1902. 3.  Charles Morice, “Les Salons de la Societe Nationale et des Artistes Francais,” Mercure de France 6, no. 162 (1903): 684.

FOR FURTHER READING Ater, Renée. Remaking Race and History: The Sculpture of Meta Warrick Fuller. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Beach, Caitlyn. “Meta Warrick Fuller’s Mary Turner and the Memory of Mob Violence.” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 36 (May 2015): 16–27. Kerr, Nina Anne. “God-Given Work: The Life and Times of Sculptor Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, 1877–1968,” PhD diss., University of Massachusetts, 1987.

META WARRICK FULLER

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THOMAS BRENT SMITH

ARTHUR PUTNAM b. 1873, Waveland, Mississippi d. 1930, Ville-d’Avray, France

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known among the artisans with whom he worked. He was a dark, mysterious sculptor of immeasurable talent, who seemed to have all the odds against him. Best known for his depictions of cougars, pumas, and other felines, Putnam was something of a sculpting prodigy. He gained critical acclaim in America as well as Paris and Rome. Throughout his career, he was praised by a myriad of artists, including Giovanni Boldini, Diego Rivera, John Singer Sargent, and, most profoundly, by Auguste Rodin—who, after long and critical examination of Putnam’s bronzes, exclaimed, “This is the work of a master!”1 Despite the accolades, he is relatively unknown today, even to fans of American art. The reasons for Putnam’s fleeting stature are numerous, but at the crux was his insistence on being a sculptor in the American West. With few exceptions, painters nearly always overshadow sculptors—already a strike against him. Aspiring to be a bronze sculptor in isolated California seems a willfully self-destructive choice at the turn of the twentieth century. These reasons, combined with a career that lasted only a decade because of a tragic illness, make it clear why Arthur Putnam appears destined to be forgotten. O IT NOW!” THUS WAS ARTHUR PUTNAM

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figure 42 Gabriel Moulin, Arthur Putnam (sketching in his notebook), early twentieth century. Photograph, 8.9 × 6.8 in. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Museum collection, 1931.246. Image courtesy of Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

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Putnam’s childhood in Omaha and California was marked by his father’s tragic death, which put the family in a difficult economic position, a quandary that the artist, despite his successes, could never seem to resolve. His mother purchased a lemon farm near San Diego, which gave the young Arthur room to roam. Putnam was a hopeless student whose interests lay in the outdoors and drawing. He had an early obsession with animals, their anatomy in particular, and it was here that Putnam first began to track and observe the big cats of the West. Putnam aspired to be an artist and enrolled in drawing classes at the San Francisco Art Students League in 1894, but his formal training lasted only a short year. The talented pupil preferred learning from professionals and became a studio assistant for sculptor Rupert Schmid (1864–1932) in San Francisco. He later spent a year in Chicago working with one of the nation’s leading animalier sculptors, Edward Kemeys (1843–1907). His education and early career were plagued by crippling financial problems that bordered on destitution. He had a plethora of odd jobs, including trapping, ranching, land surveying, and working in an iron foundry and a slaughterhouse—roles that, in retrospect, aided his later work. Determined to support himself as an artist, Putnam began modeling terra-cotta ornamentation for prominent building facades. San Francisco at the time was the undisputed art center of the American West. Before the earthquake and fire of 1906, it arguably held the highest concentration of professional artists of any city in America, other than New York. Geographically isolated and less bound by puritanical strictures, the California city was a haven for artists and writers who carved out a bohemian existence that valued free expression. Putnam was supported by diverse artists, including painters Gottardo Piazzoni (1872–1945), Maynard Dixon (1875–1946), and Xavier Martinez (1869–1943), sculptors M. Earl Cummings (1876–1936) and Ralph Stackpole (1885– 1973), and the stained-glass artist Bruce Porter (1865–1953), who all encouraged his development. Despite its community of artists, San Francisco was a particularly challenging location for an aspiring sculptor, due to its lack of high-quality bronze foundries. If Putnam were to succeed, relocating seemed inevitable and essential. Putnam traveled to Rome in 1905 and intended to learn cire perdue, the lost-wax method of casting bronze sculpture. In the spring of 1906, Putnam had three sculptures accepted in the Roman Salon at Palace Via Nationale. The Romans celebrated the American for his soulful and original realism. “He has taken only the strength of will, the violence of expression, which inform the American temperament.”2 Critic Pio Vanzi praised Putnam’s work as “a direct conscientious study of the truth. And all this not under the artificial light prepared by the white curtains of school, but by the light of life itself under the glorious ray of the sun.”3 Putnam moved on to Paris seeking new opportunities and quickly had several of his bronzes selected for the Paris Salon of 1907. The damp, gray Paris winter wore on the Californian, as he wished for the mountains and desert, the sea, and the golden sun of home. “Everything,” he swore, “from now on is to be American—Californian.”4 Against his colleagues’ efforts to persuade him to stay, Putnam absconded from Paris and headed for home. 86

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figure 43 Arthur Putnam, Snarling Jaguar, modeled 1906, cast 1909. Bronze, 2 ¾ × 11 ¾ × 3 ¾ in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rogers Fund, 1909, 09.81. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The San Francisco full of artistic camaraderie that Putnam had left behind was not the place he found upon his return. The great earthquake and fire had demolished the city, and most of the artists had fled out of necessity. Putnam was reenergized, however; he saw the resolve of the citizens as they immediately began the arduous tasks of rebuilding. He also saw opportunity, as new buildings would inevitably lead to commissions. He began working at a feverish pace. Around 1909, he and his brother-in-law, Frederick Storey, began casting his bronzes in their own amateur foundry—among the earliest lost-wax foundries in the West. During this period, he sculpted many architectural works and modeled some of his most iconic subjects. He exhibited at the Macbeth Gallery in New York in 1909, and, at the suggestion of sculptor Daniel Chester French, the Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired his bronze Snarling Jaguar. Modeled in Europe and cast at his foundry in the West, the classic feline subject embodies Putnam’s approach to sculpture, capturing his subject in an intimate moment that is simultaneously banal and ferocious; the large carnivore is at once tender and deadly. Putnam was seemingly beating the odds of his western location when tragedy hit in 1911. He was stricken with a brain tumor that called for immediate operation. While his life was spared, the surgery left permanent damage, including paralysis, and his personality changed. Nonetheless, his work continued to appear in important exhibitions, including the Armory Show of 1913, where he exhibited four works, including his wild animals and a rendition of Bacchus, the Roman god of agriculture and wine. Modernists favored his simplified forms, minimal detail, and undulating surfaces. His bronzes were a departure from the classicized ARTHUR PUTNAM

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figure 44 Arthur Putnam, Puma on Guard, n.d. Bronze, 18 ½ × 27 ⁷/₈ × 13 in. San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, California. Gift of Mrs. A. B. Spreckels, Alma Emma Spreckels, Adolph B. Spreckels, and Dorothy Spreckels, 1925.16. Photo © San Diego Museum of Art/Bridgeman Images.

styles based on French sculpture that were common in America. He won a gold medal at the Panama Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915 and was elected to the National Sculpture Society in 1913—all after his condition had severely limited his capacity to work. Alma de Bretteville Spreckels, a prominent California arts patron, bought several of his plasters that were later cast in Paris at the Alexis Rudier foundry in 1921; these were donated to the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco and the San Diego Museum of Art. Puma on Guard illustrates the artist’s extraordinary ability to capture a calm moment, yet communicate the predator’s power through its exaggerated muscularity. While the beast is powerful and scary, it is likewise elegant, with its elongated torso as it rises on its front legs. It is mostly through these casts that we know the expressive power of his work and through which we can ponder what might have been. Putnam ultimately moved to France, where he lived roughly the last decade of his life in relative obscurity. Arthur Putnam is a sculptor who was seemingly destined to be forgotten—often because of his own choices. While he repeatedly won against unfavorable odds, his tragic illness was too much for anyone to overcome. Sadly, due to this, the earthquake of 1906, and multiple studio fires, very few of his sculptures exist today. In many ways, we are left only with a ghostlike figure whom we know through the admiration of credible sources. The works that survive give us only a glimpse of a rare talent in the history of American sculpture. 88

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NOTES 1.  August Rodin, quoted in “Arthur Putnam: Sculptor of the Wild,” California Art Research 6, series 1 (1937): 29. This period biography, along with Julie H. Heyneman, Arthur Putnam: Sculptor (San Francisco: Johnck & Seeger, 1932), are the best sources for Putnam’s history. 2.  Heyneman, Arthur Putnam, 71–72. 3.  Ibid., 72. 4.  Ibid., 88.

FOR FURTHER READING Barryte, Bernard, and Roberta K. Tarbell. Rodin and America: Influence and Adaptation, 1876–1936. Stanford, CA: Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University, 2011. Berry, Rose V. S. “Arthur Putnam—California Sculptor.” American Magazine of Art 20, no. 5 (1929): 276–282. Kamerling, Bruce. “Arthur Putnam: Sculptor of the Untamed.” Antiques and Fine Art 7, no. 5 (1990): 122–129. Nemerov, Alexander. “The Dark Cat: Arthur Putnam and a Fragment of Night.” American Art 16, no. 1 (2002): 36–59. Osborne, Carol M. “Arthur Putnam, Animal Sculptor.” American Art Review 3, no. 5 (1976): 71–81. Porter, Bruce. “Arthur Putnam’s Animal Sculpture.” Sunset 14 (November 1904): 54–58. Tolles, Thayer, and Thomas Brent Smith. The American West in Bronze, 1850–1925. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2013.

ARTHUR PUTNAM

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ANTHONY W. LEE

MARGARET SUTERMEISTER b. 1875, Milton, Massachusetts d. 1950, Milton, Massachusetts

Margaret Sutermeister: Encounters with the Camera

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the photographer with stoic patience, as if the task of posing for the camera is one of quiet endurance; the younger girl, on the right, musters an expression that betrays something of her puzzlement or maybe just discomfort with the whole affair. All three are dressed in finery—plaids and pleats, tight collars, a dainty earring, a neck pin, a flamboyant hat with frills and feathers, dresses with bows and bandings. The extraordinary pattern of the dress worn by the woman on the left stands out hard against clapboards behind, like a swirl of swimming, squiggling jigsaw pieces against the cool orderliness of wood siding. It further contrasts with the bright white of the woman’s apron and, more starkly, the flowing, outsized dress of the infant she holds. The infant is cherubic, impossibly young and small, the face so tiny and the nose and mouth so sweet. There is the barest outline of a little body beneath, and something of the length of the child’s leg can be spotted in the folds that fall below. Carefully held up for the camera’s inspection, the child, we quickly realize, is dead. How Margaret Sutermeister found the women and infant remains a mystery, though perhaps the question can also be turned around to ask how the women found her. The picture commemorates a tragedy in HE TWO TALLER WOMEN REGARD

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figure 45 Margaret Sutermeister, Postmortem Photograph of an Infant Held by Two Women and a Girl, n.d. Photograph. Courtesy of the Milton Historical Society.

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their lives, for which a photographer’s services were required. There is, to be sure, an exchange of gazes between photographer and sitters, as if the event that has brought them together was also an occasion to regard each other and their mutual efforts toward some kind of temporary understanding and cooperation in the face of loss. The event was all too common in Black neighborhoods in and around Boston. The water supply was unhealthy and the presence of so much sewage lethal. Poor residents confronted infant mortality on a scale that today would make us shiver. What consideration did the photographer—a young, attractive, well-heeled lady of the suburbs—have for their experiences? What understanding did she have of their loss? I like to think that the picture thematizes something of those questions and that the photographer understood and found ways to signal her curiosity, empathy, and distance. In other photographs, Black sitters try for dignity, only to have their formal display be met with some awkward recognition of the limited ambitions a hierarchical society has allotted them. In a picture of a Chinese laundryman, Sutermeister made sure to include the clutter of bills, letters, order forms, and stacks of clean and folded laundry as part of the setting—evidence of a thriving business. The laundryman’s dandyish umbrella, smart hat, and easy pose show an equally confident businessman. And yet what is most arresting is the small alarm clock: suspended front and center, it is the object of clearest focus, the result of Sutermeister training her lens just right. However she understood the Chinese man’s composure and success, it bore some relationship to time passing: time being measured, time about up, an end point both anticipated and deferred in the encounter between photographer and sitter. The detail is typical of her. After the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882 and its extension in 1892, everyone knew that most Chinese in Boston were illegal residents. At least that is how I see pictures like these, but the fact remains that we know too little about Sutermeister and her work to make a definitive case. Like many middle-class women of her generation, Sutermeister was born, raised, lived, and died in the same house. The family’s flower and nursery business was immediately next door to the family home, and Sutermeister’s social world was almost entirely circumscribed by the comfortable towns south of Boston. This is not to say that all was static: most towns in the metropolitan region had been undergoing radical change in the aftermath of the Opium Wars and the increased wealth brought by the China trade, and by the introduction of steam power to the old mills, which took advantage of the fast-flowing rivers, transformed small workshops into fullfledged factories, and altered the physical and social character of old farming communities. Toward the turn of the century, electric trolleys supplanted horse-drawn carriages, rail lines more fully connected the towns to each other and the city, and Boston’s immigrant, migrant, and colored classes began slowly to spread south as day laborers, domestics, and factory hands. Affluent towns like Milton remained white bastions, but one needed only to cross the town line to a place like Brockton to encounter an increasingly large Black population. The indigenous Neponset people still had a small presence, and Sutermeister sought out the individual who she thought was the town’s last surviving tribeswoman for a photograph. 92

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figure 46 Margaret Sutermeister, Asian Laundryman, n.d. Photograph. Courtesy of the Milton Historical Society.

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As a teenager, Sutermeister took up the camera, a 4 × 5 Seneca Box Landscape, at a time when the national magazines first began promoting photography as a suitable profession for ambitious and resourceful women. In 1897, the photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston famously declared in the Ladies’ Home Journal that such a woman could succeed if she had “good common sense, unlimited patience to carry her through endless failures, equally unlimited tact, good taste, a quick eye, a talent for detail, and a genius for hard work.”1 The prescription was more bromide than truly helpful, and it had its share of class and racial biases as to what constituted tact and taste; but it had the effect of encouraging women like Sutermeister to pursue the craft and explore their sensibilities. It’s unclear whether she made any profit or whether her ambitions ever rose to match Johnston’s, though a hundred of her pictures were soon deposited in the local historical society and ten more eventually made their way to the Smithsonian—heady stuff for a photographer who seems to have avoided the local camera clubs and exhibition societies. And anyway, in the 1890s any distinction between and among professional photographer, avid amateur, backyard dabbler, and art-minded experimenter was blurry at best. She did pursue some of the subjects deemed especially suitable to a lady’s photographic skills: images of babies and children, domestic portraits, the substantial houses of the middle classes. But she also regularly exceeded these in spectacular fashion: she traveled to Canada to photograph the Maliseet people, and apparently to the American South to picture ex-slaves and their descendants; searched for Gypsies, Chinese, and Blacks in and around the metropolitan area; found Abenaki and Micmac itinerants who came south from Maine and New Hampshire to sell their baskets in the Massachusetts markets; confronted day laborers and domestics; and more. The efforts at photographic and cultural encounter seemed to serve as ongoing ballast to the images of propertied New England. They suggest that some young women—perhaps many more than has been previously assumed—took the social and experiential opportunities afforded by the earliest portable cameras as a means to expand, maybe even pierce through, the limited racial circles of their upbringings and confront their understandings of others. For those sitters who found Sutermeister, women like her seemed better choices for their needs than the contrivances offered by the commercial studio. The encounters, that is to say, brought forth a marriage of complements, of differences and desires from both sides of the lens, and found expression in photography’s emerging street language. Sutermeister’s career with the camera was quite brief, perhaps only fifteen years or, according to one estimate, maybe only six. In 1909 her father died, leaving the family’s nursery untended, and Sutermeister, aged thirty-four and unmarried (she would remain so), put the camera aside and for the next half century kept the business afloat. It’s unknown whether she thought she would eventually return to photography; she left no written thoughts on the matter. The nursery had its ups and downs, and no doubt there were some extraordinarily lean years during the national financial crises, requiring the juggling of income and staff and the giving up of any luxuries. Whatever the many circumstances, Sutermeister ended up leaving photography behind for good. At some point, she carefully packaged her entire cache of eighteen hundred glass plate negatives, stored them in their original boxes, carefully la94

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beled each box in chronological sequence, piled all of them into a crate, and laid them to rest in a barn adjacent to her house, as if allowing her pictures’ and their sitters’ fates to be determined by future generations. They remained there, untouched, until her death, when the new owners of the property found them. I like to imagine that the act of gathering, labeling, and storing the glass plates—each carrying a precious, hard-won image—was accompanied by some nostalgia, perhaps melancholy, maybe even some sadness at an adventurousness not realized and a passion not pursued. But that is a fancy on my part, and what we need now is to know more about Margaret Sutermeister and her pictures. NOTES 1.  Frances B. Johnston, “What a Woman Can Do with a Camera,” Ladies’ Home Journal 14, no. 10 (1897): 6.

FOR FURTHER READING Bookbinder, Judith A. Margaret Sutermeister: Chronicling Seen and Unseen Worlds, 1894–1909. Milton, MA: Milton Historical Society, 1993. Sichel, Kim. Black Boston: Documentary Photography and the African American Experience. Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 1994.

MARGARET SUTERMEISTER

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LESLIE UMBERGER

BILL TRAYLOR b. ca. 1853, Dallas County, Alabama d. 1949, Montgomery, Alabama

There is a prophet within us, forever whispering that behind the seen lies the immeasurable unseen.

frederick douglass, 1862 1

Bill Traylor: The Immeasurable Unseen

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a visual record of his extraordinary lifetime, the sun of his day, as Frederick Douglass had once put it, was nearing the horizon. I believe that Traylor had come to understand, as Douglass had confidently known, that his experience was important. He had reached a turning point, a moment when he saw the past and future in stark relief and set about attesting to the dehumanizing experience of living at the bottom of society in a racist America. For evaluating or interpreting Traylor’s visual autobiography, the art historical canon offers little. That age-old system centered and celebrated the narrowly defined masterpieces of Western art and rarely anything else. Even as the twentieth century demanded a broadening of standards for artistic achievement, the criteria for “great artists” remained rigid. So ingrained and obliterating have been the dominant culture’s measure of great art and those who make it, that while introducing Traylor’s work to a gathering in 2016, I was asked by someone well versed in art and museums if these pieces—done on oddments of cardboard, flatly and sometimes roughly rendered, made by a onceHEN BILL TRAYLOR BEGAN MAKING

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enslaved, untrained Black man—could even be considered art at all. His incomprehension laid bare the urgency of a shift that was gaining favor but still had no mandate in museum culture: to snuff out ideals based on a “timeless and universal” (white) aesthetic in favor of evaluation that honors communal and cultural contexts. More specifically, this shift involves addressing the racism and systemic oppression that fuels the art-world machine and reconciling the important art of our time with a befitting system of value. What I saw in Traylor’s drawings and paintings was the graphic ingenuity and poetic radicalism of an artist who, without guidance, had bypassed language and used images to speak about racism. Traylor developed an allegorical style that conveyed visual texts to his community but presented more opaquely to the oppressing culture—a culture that denied the child literacy, and presumed that the man remained simplistic and servile. Traylor made over a thousand images in a time and place wherein such expression could have cost him his life. Against the odds, he evaded scrutiny and became the only known artist born into slavery to leave behind a sizable body of drawn and painted work. That the theme of the oeuvre is the experience of his people between the Civil War and civil rights in the Deep South makes it a record of inestimable import. That it deftly balances horror with delight, narration with abstraction, and the personal with something far larger, situates it among the most significant oeuvres in the history of American art. Traylor’s life is central to the artworks he made in his final decade. He was born around 1853, to parents of African descent enslaved in rural Alabama, into an existence that author Ta-Nehisi Coates has called “the coffin.”2 Unlike enslaved laborers taught a craft in support of the plantation’s enterprise, such as the master potter Dave Drake, Traylor learned only the brutal labor of the fields. If segregationists had interpreted his imagery as a critique of white society, it might have cost him his life. Traylor experienced slavery, the Civil War, Emancipation, Reconstruction and its demise into Jim Crow, the Great Migration (which led most of his progeny northward and eastward), and the rise of African American culture in the state capital of Montgomery, where he spent the last twenty or so years of his life. This last chapter, so radically different from anything Traylor had experienced in seven-plus preceding decades as to seem all but impossible, prompted him to bear witness. In his final years, Traylor had little to his name and relied on his community for food and shelter, but once he started pouring his memories onto paper, he didn’t stop. Some say Bill Traylor is no longer overlooked or forgotten. He gained minor acclaim in 1982, when thirty-six of his works were featured in the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s Black Folk Art in America: 1930–1980. After that, Traylor had steady representation at museums and galleries, but always within the limited framework of folk or “outsider” art. Within the snug confines of the white-dominated art world, there remains an ignorant ease with this latter, dog-whistle category, designed to marginalize first and then celebrate the marginalized. For too long, the media and the commercial market have codependently profited from upholding a classification that patently signals inferiority, maintaining the optics of diversity without advancing equity or meaningful inclusion. In 2018, the Smithsonian American Art Museum opened Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor, a retrospective, seven years in the making, which I organized. My priority was to BILL TRAYLOR

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figure 47 Bill Traylor, Untitled (Legs Construction with Blue Man), ca. 1940–42. Opaque watercolor, pencil, and charcoal on paperboard, 12 ¾ × 10 ½ in. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2016.14.3. © 1994, Bill Traylor Family Trust.

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figure 48 Bill Traylor, Untitled (Red Goat with Snake), ca. 1940–42. Opaque watercolor and pencil on paperboard, 11 ¾ × 14 ¼ in. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gift of Judy A. Saslow, 2016.15. © 1994, Bill Traylor Family Trust.

position Traylor as a uniquely important artist—beyond categories. My conviction was unwavering, but the lack of Traylor’s voice and my identity as a white northerner of privilege necessitated collaboration with a number of Black contributors and experts of varied perspectives, to flesh out the complexities of artworks the maker hadn’t the agency to speak openly about. By clarifying my role and an approach of multiplicity, I avoid the pretense of an authoritative third-person narrative, acknowledge that addressing bias (personal and institutional) takes time and commitment, and own both the knowledge acquired on the journey and any curatorial deficiencies the project ultimately suffered. While Between Worlds had abundant positive support, the cynics were not few. There were those who would not see beyond the work’s surface and doubted that it was truly incisive, coded, or sophisticated. Some viewed Traylor’s failure to become literate after emancipation as a shortcoming that revoked his right to serious consideration—they concluded that his art was ultimately accidental, not intentional. Others asserted that there was nothing more to learn about the facts of Traylor’s life, that the word of the white man who laid sole claim to BILL TRAYLOR

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figure 49 Bill Traylor, Untitled (Seated Woman), ca. 1940–42. Pencil and opaque watercolor on paperboard, 14 ½ × 8 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum. The Margaret Z. Robson Collection. Gift of John E. and Douglas O. Robson, 2016.38.92. © 1994, Bill Traylor Family Trust.

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discovering Traylor’s art was the gospel truth. Foremost were many who thought Traylor could not or should not be presented without positioning qualifiers before the honorific of “artist.” It is thanks to a small group of progressive white artists who met Traylor in Montgomery and saved his artwork, between 1939 and 1942, that Traylor is known to us at all. He did not live to see his project regarded as anything important; during his lifetime, few saw him as a human of any merit at all. Ultimately, Between Worlds revealed Traylor and his art to a far wider audience than ever before. Yet beyond a limited sphere of initiates, he remains largely unheard of, and the coterie of people that grasp the magnitude of Traylor’s endeavor is grievously small. In the manner of oral traditions, Traylor’s narratives often play out in groups of related works rather than as concise single images. He tangled with the representation of hard ideas by drawing them over and over, with varying degrees of success. This complicates succinct readings of single artworks, so I forgo such attempts here and point to the exhibition’s accompanying monograph for deeper assessments. Traylor learned that cultural perspective influenced the interpretation of images and narratives, and he used that knowledge to his advantage. His pictures describe racial hierarchy in armed overseers, browbeaten laborers, and barefoot thieves desperate for food. He employs animals to symbolize character, power struggles, and deep interracial discord. Traylor’s work is saturated with the violence of his world: people being clubbed, menaced by dogs, or hunted like prey. More rarely, Traylor depicted the indelible horror of figures hanging from trees. But Traylor also recorded a transforming way of life: Black people in 1930s–1940s Montgomery, strutting, playing, shopping, conversing, toting pets, clad in patterned fabric or bold, power-radiating colors— things unimaginable on the plantation. Virtue and consequence were embodied in the form of the preacher; vice came dressed as drinkers and dancers. He made somber silhouettes— chins up, arms akimbo—distilling pride and perseverance. Comprehensively, Bill Traylor made images that recorded but also concealed; his images interweave readable narratives and arcane symbolism, but the story of his life offers tremendous illumination. Still, mainstream culture remains reluctant to look longer and more closely at a body of work that tells a profound story, to acknowledge that appearances of simplicity can be deceiving, to do the hard work of confronting bias and finding new tools for interpreting what is offered. Appearing to the white world around him as an old, broken-down, benighted ex-slave, Traylor revealed, on scraps of discarded paperboard, his inner prophet. His images retain myriad secrets, but loudly whisper that behind the seen lies the immeasurable unseen. NOTES 1.  The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself (Boston: De Wolfe & Fiske, 1892), 581. 2.  Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Water Dancer (New York: Penguin Random House, 2019). Throughout this novel, Coates refers to slavery, particularly in the Deep South, as “the coffin,” a life worse than death.

FOR FURTHER READING Umberger, Leslie. Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor. Introduction by Kerry James Marshall. Washington, DC: Smithsonian American Art Museum in Association with Princeton University Press, 2018.

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RICHARD MEYER

MORRIS HIRSHFIELD b. 1872, western Poland; to United States, ca. 1890 d. 1946, Brooklyn, New York

Tailor-Made: Morris Hirshfield in the 1940s

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and no connection to elite culture, Morris Hirshfield was never expected to make history. Born into a poor Jewish family in provincial Poland, he emigrated at the age of eighteen to New York City, changed his first name from Moishe to Morris, and found a job as a pattern cutter in a women’s coat factory. For the next forty-five years, Hirshfield worked his way up through the trade. He eventually became a tailor and the proprietor, with his brother, of a cloak and suit shop in Brooklyn. After the shop closed, Hirshfield founded the EZ Walk Manufacturing Company, a company that made arch supports, ankle straighteners, and footwear. By the late 1920s, EZ WALK would emerge as one of the leading makers of boudoir slippers in the nation. When health concerns forced him to retire at sixty-five, Hirshfield took up painting for the first time. After completing three pictures, he showed his work to a curator at the Brooklyn Museum who sent it on to the Manhattan gallerist Hudson Walker. Unimpressed by the work, Walker was about send it back to Brooklyn when the collector (and soon-to-be dealer) Sidney Janis visited the gallery. Noticing two forlorn paintings on the floor and facing the wall, Janis turned them around. He was so captivated by Hirshfield’s pictures, parITH LITTLE FORMAL EDUCATION

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figure 50 Morris Hirshfield, Angora Cat, 1937. Oil on canvas, 22 ¹/₈ × 27 ¼ in. The Museum of Modern Art. The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection, 607.1967. © 2021 Robert and Gail Rentzer for Estate of Morris Hirshfield; licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art; licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

ticularly Angora Cat, that he promptly included them in a show he was guest curating for the Museum of Modern Art entitled Contemporary Unknown American Painters. Like another artist who debuted in the exhibition, Anna Mary Robertson (or “Grandma”) Moses, Hirshfield did not remain unknown for long. His wildly stylized paintings of animals, landscapes, and female figures, often nude, attracted a great deal of attention, both positive and negative, in the 1940s. Admired by Pablo Picasso, Piet Mondrian, and Marcel Duchamp, among other members of the international avant-garde, the artist was included in the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition in 1942, the most important show of international surrealism in America to that time. That same year, the modernist critic Clement Greenberg declared that Hirshfield “would hold his own against any competition” of living American painters.1 The painter’s provocative Nude at the Window (Hot Night in July) was purchased by Peggy Guggenheim for display in her storied townhouse near Beekman Place. Hirshfield’s peak moment of public visibility occurred in 1943, when the Museum of Modern Art mounted a one-man show of his work. The exhibition was widely reviewed, though MORRIS HIRSHFIELD

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figure 51 Morris Hirshfield, Nude at the Window (Hot Night in July), 1941. Oil on canvas, 54 × 30 in. © 2021 Robert and Gail Rentzer for Estate of Morris Hirshfield; licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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figure 52 Installation view of the exhibition The Paintings of Morris Hirshfield, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, June 23–August 1, 1943. Photographic Archive, The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art; licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York. © 2021 Robert and Gail Rentzer for Estate of Morris Hirshfield; licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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mostly reviled, by the press. With the exception of Greenberg, critics were incensed that the museum lavished curatorial attention on an unschooled amateur while ignoring the work of deserving professional artists. “Enough is enough of an oddity,” fumed the Art Digest in a notice cleverly titled “Tailor-Made Show Suits Nobody.”2 The New York Herald Tribune characterized the show as the “worst blunder” in MoMA’s history.3 When Alfred Barr was forced to resign as the museum’s director a few months later, his sponsorship of the exhibition was among the reasons cited by the board for dismissal. Hirshfield was characterized by the press as an outer-borough primitive in ways so insistent that they sound, in retrospect, nearly parodic. In introducing the artist to a national audience, Newsweek reported the following: In a modest brick house way out in what Manhattanites like to call the wilds of Brooklyn (the Bensonhurst section), lives a little old man named Morris Hirshfield. He has a youthful face, a figure bent beyond his years, a thick, Russian accent, and a chuckle (heh, heh, heh) like a character in a fairy tale. Last week, this old man, an untaught artist, who began painting just six years ago received one of the highest honors that can be accorded a contemporary painter—a one-man retrospective show at the elegant, sophisticated (and air conditioned) Museum of Modern Art in the center of Manhattan.4

Newsweek narrates a fable of a little old man with a stoop and imperfect command of English residing in a remote and uncivilized location—way out in the “wilds of Brooklyn.” The word Jewish is never mentioned, though the vocabulary employed to describe Hirshfield’s appearance, accent, and native habitat would easily have suggested as much to period readers. The period reporting on Hirshfield often struck a tone of lighthearted disdain, as though there were something intrinsically amusing about a Brooklyn tailor and shoemaker posing as a modern artist. The Art Digest jeeringly crowned Hirshfield the “Master of the Two Left Feet”5 for his tendency to display the female body in that unorthodox fashion. This anatomical “mistake,” alongside the painter’s other distortions of the human figure, was attributed to severely limited technical abilities. The moniker “Master of the Two Left Feet” alluded to important but anonymous painters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries who were named after the place, format, or subject matter with which they were associated (e.g., “Master of Flémalle,” “Master of St. Cecilia”). Hirshfield was neither anonymous nor, from the perspective of the Herald Tribune, an expert in the craft of painting. Rather than the master of a particular place or theme, he was presented as the master of a mistake. Hirshfield saw the matter quite differently. The artist claimed, in fact, that his paintings were “more true” to reality than even the most accurate photographic image. At first glance, this claim would seem outlandish or hopelessly misguided. His paintings all but take flight from reality. Hirshfield did not, however, seek photographic veracity. The truth he pursued corresponded to an internal vision of the world rather than an external or objective capture of it.6 It included not only pictures of women with two left feet, but also dogs that resembled 106

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horses, garden fountains with phallic spouts and female nudes, and a “stage girl” wearing a giant green antenna as a headdress. No wonder the surrealists embraced him as a kindred spirit. Unlike them, however, Hirshfield insisted that each of his paintings represented pictorial truth rather than a dreamworld or transformation of the unconscious. His mistakes of drawing, composition, and anatomy were not, from his perspective, mistaken. Following his death in 1946, Hirshfield was gradually excluded from the history and curatorial presentation of modern American art. His sidelining was part of a larger trend that swept folk and self-taught artists, with the exception of Henri Rousseau, out of the history of modernism. After World War II, folk art became a distinct subfield with its own museums, publications, and collecting base. While familiar within this context, Hirshfield was largely forgotten by mainstream art history. In his own day, Hirshfield’s paintings were taken seriously by leading artists and collectors as visually innovative, genuinely original expressions of modernity. The retrieval of figures such as Hirshfield from the historical record allows a broader, if messier, sense of twentieth-century American art to emerge. Narratives of avant-garde innovation give way to multiple art worlds and competing versions of creative expression. It is not a question of choosing between the eccentric and the canonical (between, say, Hirshfield and Edward Hopper) but rather of devising a framework within which both are seen to constitute the history of art. Hirshfield’s unlikely career as a painter is not simply a missing episode in the history of twentieth-century art. It is also a case study of how artists “go missing” from scholarly knowledge and historical memory. By looking at the ways in which Hirshfield mattered in the 1940s, we gain a sense of how much we have yet to learn, and to see, of the visual past. NOTES 1.  See Clement Greenberg, “Review of Vlaminck by Klaus G. Perls; Paul Klee: Paintings, Watercolors, 1913 to 1939, edited by Karl Nierendorf; and They Taught Themselves: American Primitive Painters of the Twentieth Century by Sidney Janis,” Partisan Review, March/April 1942, reprinted in John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 1: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 94. 2.  “Tailor-Made Show Suits Nobody,” Art Digest, July 1943. 3.  “New York ‘Primitive,’ ” New York Herald Tribune, June 27, 1943. 4.  “Naïve Lion,” Newsweek, July 5, 1943, 92. 5.  “Master of the Two Left Feet,” Art Digest, July 1943. 6.  As Janis put it at the time, “Hirshfield paints realism; not the realism of outer representation but that of the inner life of the individual.” Sidney Janis, quoted in “Retrospective Exhibition of Primitive Paintings by Retried Cloak and Suit and Slipper Manufacturer Shown at Museum of Modern Art,” press release, Museum of Modern Art, June 21, 1943, 1.

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ELIZABETH HUTCHINSON

GERALD NAILOR (TOH YAH) Navajo b. 1917, Diné Bikéyah, possibly in Pinedale, New Mexico d. 1952, Picurís, New Mexico

Gerald Nailor: “Fine art, full of pattern, and, to this observer, thrilling”

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O UNDERSTAND THE MULTIPLICITY of American modernities, one might do worse than turn to the work of Gerald Nailor (Navajo).1 While still a student at the Santa Fe Indian School’s famed painting school, the Studio, Nailor was included in group exhibitions in Santa Fe, Denver, Chicago, Brooklyn, and Los Angeles. He was later included in important Native art exhibitions at MoMA, the National Gallery of Art, and several New York galleries, where he was frequently singled out for his sense of design and economy of line. Importantly, he also sought out opportunities to work closely with other Native artists and serve Native audiences. Although the Diné painter died young, his extant work demonstrates his active engagement with the constraints imposed by white, mostly governmental, patronage—in part (as his obituary noted) by continually “seeking refreshment for a new approach” in the face of a stagnant definition of Indian painting.2 Nailor’s pictures reveal his training with Dorothy Dunn, who founded the Studio in 1932 to cultivate and promote what she saw as the natural artistic abilities of Native students. Dunn’s students found her a supportive teacher but chafed against her insistence that authen-

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tic Native painting featured flat, unmodeled figures set in empty space and centered on depictions of traditional activities. Dunn opposed work that demonstrated an engagement with Euro-American visual culture, denying the very real ways Natives had been negotiating tradition and modernity in the Southwest for centuries. Already an accomplished artist who had worked as an illustrator, Nailor studied with Dunn from 1935 to 1937. Early compositions, such as Navajo Woman and Colt, demonstrate the elegance of his forms and his decorative use of pattern. Following Dunn’s emphasis on artists using their own tribal traditions, he incorporated motifs from Navajo weaving and sandpainting, frequently at the margins or in the background, “framing” his representational subject matter with imagery that referenced culturally specific relationships to the people, animals, and plants depicted. Dunn later praised her pupil for conveying a strong impression of tribal life and for his skillful brushwork. The painter pursued additional training with Kenneth Chapman in Santa Fe and Olle Nordmark in Oklahoma, probably at the Indian Art Center in Fort Sill, where Nordmark was engaged in training Native artists from 1938 to 1940. Both teachers had a strong influence on the development of twentieth-century Native American art. Despite Dunn’s admonitions, Nailor appears also to have learned from mainstream American visual culture. Nailor’s legacy was cemented with his commissions for murals in federal buildings. In 1938, he and his Studio classmate Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache) decorated the Indian Craft Shop on the ground floor of the Department of the Interior (DOI); a year later, he and Houser joined four other Native artists to paint walls in other parts of the building, along with more than a dozen leading WPA muralists. Nailor later made federally sponsored murals in Colorado and Arizona. His DOI pieces feature scenes of hunting, a ceremonial, and the preparation of wool for weaving. These paintings incorporate flat forms, decorative vegetal motifs, and abstract designs derived from tribal visual culture, but their dynamism and compositional complexity belie his growth as an artist. In each vignette, figures interact and overlap in balanced compositions that accommodate the allotted spaces (between windows and around doorways) with graceful ease. The DOI commission offered Nailor much-needed paid employment and the opportunity to work alongside other Indian painters. At the same time, it reinforced the artists’ understanding of federal attitudes toward Native people. Nailor received requests to make his designs more “authentic” and “typical.” A proposed depiction of tourists admiring a weaver’s work in progress, a composition similar to one that had attracted attention at New Mexico Museum’s Annual Indian Art Show in 1937, was rejected as “inappropriate.” Like Dunn, the DOI wanted Nailor to avoid references to the complexities of contemporary Navajo life. The female tourist’s fashionable cloche and heels suggest Nailor’s familiarity with mass culture, and his gentle parody of the rich invites comparison with Diego Rivera and Miguel Covarrubias—suggesting that Nailor, like so many artists of his generation, may have taken an interest in these Mexican artists whose work was widely published in the American press. Nailor’s final designs allude with humor to the artificiality of asking Native painters trained in art schools and working in a cosmopolitan city to eschew representing GERALD NAILOR

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figure 53 Gerald Nailor, Navajo Woman and Colt, 1938. Watercolor, 15 ⁵/₈ × 18 in. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Educational Purchase Fund, 1939.91. Courtesy of the Cleveland Museum of Art.

contemporary experience. This is particularly apparent in his renderings of animals interacting with room fixtures: in one vignette, a skunk appears to be sniffing at a light switch; in another, a thirsty-looking horse stretches toward a water fountain. The animals’ cartoonish curiosity about modern technologies such as electric lighting and internal plumbing might be seen as subtly poking fun at non-Native construction of “authentic” Native life as precontact. A careful viewer might also note all the signs of centuries-long cultural exchange in Nailor’s paintings, in which the blouses and skirts of Navajo women—and, indeed, their work with sheep and wool—were the result of interactions with Spanish and American settlers. Indeed, in responding to patrons’ taste, Nailor may have felt a connection to the tradition of weavers’ strategic engagement with traders in order to earn the money needed to sustain their families and community. Certainly, Nailor’s pursuit of diverse opportunities— from opening a studio with Houser in Santa Fe in 1937, to selling designs through the silkscreen print studio Tewa Enterprises in the 1950s, to accepting a range of illustration 110

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figure 54 Gerald Nailor, Untitled, 1937. Gouache on illustration board, 14 × 12 ¾ in. Dorothy Dunn collection, courtesy of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology, Santa Fe, New Mexico, no. 51404.

commissions—demonstrates a flexibility and resourcefulness he may have observed in the Navajo artists who engaged with traders and tourists in Gallup, where he grew up. Nailor’s most ambitious work is “The History and Progress of the Navajo People,” painted in the Navajo Nation Council Chamber during 1942–43, a mural cycle that deftly negotiates the needs of his white patrons and his local audience. The Council House, designed to resemble a traditional Navajo hogan, was erected by the Public Works Administration to GERALD NAILOR

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figure 55 Gerald Nailor, The History and Progress of the Navajo Nation, 1942. Mural, Navajo Nation Council Chamber, Window Rock, Arizona. Photo: Gabriel Rodriguez. © The Trustees of Columbia University, Media Center for Art History, Department of Art History & Archaeology.

express values of the “Indian New Deal,” which moved away from assimilationist policy to one more centered on tribal self-management. Commissioner of Indian Affairs John Collier, a reformer, advocated some policies geared toward developing tribal governance and economic growth that met with tribal opposition. His program of stock reduction, aimed at mitigating overgrazing and drought, was insensitive to the essential role sheep play in Navajo culture. 112

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Nailor’s history cycle includes numerous episodes of Navajo people’s encounters with Euro-Americans, including their military internment at Bosque Redondo from 1864 to 1868 and the subsequent treaties and federal policies that impacted the establishment, allotment, and resource management of the reservation. The mural cycle ends with a scene of educational and agricultural thriving that seemingly endorses contemporary federal policy. Several aspects of the paintings would have sent a different message to the Navajo users of this space, however. Most notably, the cycle unfolds in a counterclockwise sequence, asking the viewer to move in the opposite direction than one would in a ceremonial hogan, underscoring the secular nature of the governance undertaken in this chamber. With similar sharpness to his earlier work, Nailor has incorporated details to call into question the Navajo’s experiences with the United States and reinforce values and respect for the leaders who had negotiated the difficulties of the past that would resonate with the legislators. Significantly for both Navajo and Euro-American viewers, sheep figure prominently on every wall. Nailor’s critique is once again strengthened by his artistic choices. The “History” panels are more complicated than his previous work, weaving together larger groups of figures and more elaborate settings, and moving beyond pure decoration to show recognizable individuals and places. Nailor combined multiple scenes on each wall, using gesture, line, and gaze to create complex interactions that enrich the understanding of each. The vignettes are separated by diagonals that have been compared to the section lines seen in Navajo weavings, to contemporary film montage, and to the compositional strategies of contemporary non-Native muralists (by Dunn, who disapproved of the direction he was going). Likely he was thinking of all three, a combination that drives home Nailor’s refusal to separate his Indianness from modernity. Placing his signature on a locomotive reminiscent of Thomas Hart Benton, Nailor claims an artistic identity that powers through limiting expectations. NOTES 1.  The quotation in the title of this essay is from J.W.L., “Earth Tones in Tempera by Talented Indians,” Art News 38, no. 6 (1939), 11. 2.  Hester Jones, “Gerald Nailor, Famous Navajo Artist 1917–1952,” El Palacio 59 (September 1952), 294.

FOR FURTHER READING Bernstein, Bruce, and W. Jackson Rushing. Modern by Tradition: American Indian Painting in the Studio Style. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1995. Dunn, Dorothy. “America’s First Painters: Indians, Who Once Painted Rocks and Buffalo Hides, Now Use Paper and Canvas to Preserve Ancient Art Forms.” National Geographic Magazine 57, no. 3 (1955): 349–377. Liebowitz, Rachel. Constructing the Navajo Capital: Landscape, Power, and Representation at Window Rock. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press (forthcoming). McLerran, Jennifer. A New Deal for Native Art: Indian Arts and Federal Policy, 1933–1943. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009. Nelson, Christine. “Indian Art in Washington: Native American Murals in the Department of the Interior Building.” American Indian Art Magazine 20, no. 2 (1995): 70–81, 83.

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AMANDA BURDAN

DORIS EMRICK LEE b. 1905, Aledo, Illinois d. 1983, Clearwater, Florida

The Ambitious, Agile, Adaptable Doris Lee

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work only a few years ago, in a traveling exhibition of highlights from the Phillips Collection, which was on loan to my institution. As I was developing programming around it, I realized that only three women artists were included on the checklist: Grandma Moses, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Doris Lee. Two of the artists were virtually household names, but I didn’t know the third. I chose to consider the three together, finding fascinating parallels in the lives of these twentieth-century women. As I delved into researching Lee, I found it difficult to believe she had not received more scholarly treatment. I couldn’t find a single book about her.1 Having spent many years researching the little-known American women artists of the nineteenth century, I saw in the development of Lee’s career a pattern that was familiar. Lee was from an artistic background—her grandfather painted, and she described her upbringing as creative in many ways. Her husband was an artist, of sorts. When she married Russell Lee in 1927, he was more of a chemical engineer with an interest in photography, but the two developed their artistic skills side by side in the United States and abroad. She enjoyed a life of privilege that allowed her to travel and pursue art, rather than raise a FIRST LEARNED OF DORIS LEE’S

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family or earn a more regular wage. These are all characteristics frequently shared by the women artists who came before her. Of particular interest to me—and relevant to understanding the lived experiences of twentieth-century women artists—is the extreme flexibility in style Lee exhibited over her career. While many artists progress through phases of stylistic development, Lee strikes out to the extremes, all in a relatively short time frame. From folksy regionalism and quirky illustration to neoprimitive realism and austere abstraction, she was relentless in her approaches to art making in the 1930s and 1940s. Ultimately, this multivalency may be one of the reasons she has not received more scholarly attention: in many ways, she defies categorization. Her first major success in the art world, winning the Logan Prize at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1935, turned quickly from triumph to ridicule. Beyond the recognition of the award committee, Lee’s painting Thanksgiving succeeded in attracting the public’s attention, too. The Indianapolis Star reported that nearly as many people gather about Doris Lee’s “Thanksgiving” as they did when Whistler’s “Mother” was the chief attraction for art crowds at A Century of Progress [the fair held in Chicago the previous year]. There is a difference however, in the attitude of the viewers: While they stood in silence—almost in awe—before the Whistler masterpiece, they now are amused and mirthful as they discuss Miss Lee’s figure composition in an old-fashioned country kitchen when the turkey and fixin’s are being looked after by mom and Aunt Sue and sis and cousin Jennie, not to mention various others who look on waiting for the white meat to be tender and the pumpkin pie to be a golden brown.

Officials at the Art Institute claimed that it was the most widely publicized of any picture in recent years, and newspapers all over the United States reproduced Thanksgiving.2 In 1935, perhaps Whistlerian awed silence was the goal in museum exhibitions. Today, I’d much rather exhibit a work that stirs conversation among the viewers in the gallery. Lee’s painting, like Grant Wood’s American Gothic, which debuted in Chicago just five years earlier, was described as a “comic valentine” to the American people. Associating the Wood and Lee paintings with popular ephemera removed them from the realm of “fine art.” In some circles that was an insult, but in others it was a confirmation of the work’s relevance to everyday life in modern America. Thanksgiving was not so widely reproduced solely because of its popularity, however. A great deal of publicity ensued when the patron of the award it won, Mrs. Josephine Logan, visited the gallery and declared the painting “trash.” A photograph, with Logan pointing at the painting accusatorially, was republished in Life magazine two years later in a feature on Lee. The caption read: “ ‘Fancy giving a $500 prize for an awful thing like that,’ said Chicago’s Mrs. F. G. Logan inspecting Doris Lee’s prize-winning Thanksgiving. ‘The most pathetic part of all is that we cannot possibly withdraw the award.’ ”3 For years Logan targeted the painting, which she saw as emblematic of dangerous, European-influenced modernism, and she DORIS EMRICK LEE

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figure 56 Doris Lee, Thanksgiving, 1935. Oil on canvas, 28 ¹/₈ × 40 ¹/₈ in. The Art Institute of Chicago. Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Purchase Prize Fund. Photo © The Art Institute of Chicago/Bridgeman Images. © The Estate of Doris Lee, courtesy of D. Wigmore Fine Art Inc.

even founded the Society for Sanity in Art in response to the perceived threat. Ironically, the regionalist flavor of Lee’s Thanksgiving was already a significantly Americanized revision of her previous training with French cubist André Lhote. Lee continued to stretch her artistic production after Thanksgiving, demonstrating a kind of dogged resilience found in the careers of many tenacious women of the art world. In 1937, she completed a major mural commission as part of the Treasury Department’s Section of Fine Arts program for the U.S. Postal Department in Washington, D.C., on the theme of the development of the rural postal system. She was the only woman to work on the postal headquarters’ murals, alongside such artists as Rockwell Kent and Reginald Marsh. Her consciously nostalgic regional style was criticized as too caricatured and lacking the sophistication of the other murals in the building. While her particular form of regionalism was at its peak in the late 1930s, it was not the only style she engaged at the time. She worked in the more surreal style depicted in Catastrophe (1936) and showed the beginnings of an intention116

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figure 57 Doris Lee, Grauman’s Chinese Theater, 1945. Oil on canvas, 28 ¼ × 32 ¹/₈ in. The Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, Ohio. Museum purchase with funds provided in part by the James F. Dicke Family, 1996.273. © The Estate of Doris Lee, courtesy of D. Wigmore Fine Art Inc.

ally naive style that would lead to a longer relationship with Life magazine and her later characterization as a folk artist. Beginning with the profile “Doris Lee: An American Painter with a Humorous Sense of Violence” in 1937, she proved to be a curiosity to Life readers. In 1945, she went on assignment for Life (one of several such assignments) to capture the spectacle of Hollywood for their readers, including a star-spangled scene from the filming of State Fair, a portrait of Edward G. Robinson with his prized painting by Georges Rouault, and a view of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Her illustrative style was bold and decorative, bending toward a folk aesthetic. More than supplying the images, Lee was a character in the travelogues she illustrated, with such titles as “Doris Lee’s Tropic Tour” or “An Artist in Africa: Doris Lee Paints the Arab World.” While Lee’s work seemed too modern for some critics, and not modern enough for others, her style and persona most certainly appealed to the public. DORIS EMRICK LEE

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figure 58 Doris Lee, Oranges and Avocados, ca. 1950s. Oil on canvas panel, 16 × 20 in. The Westmoreland Museum of American Art. Gift of Mr. And Mrs. Charles H. Booth Jr. and Burrell Group Inc., 2009.10. © The Estate of Doris Lee, courtesy of D. Wigmore Fine Art Inc.

The critical disagreement over Lee’s paintings and her popularity as an illustrator closed several doors that would have offered entry into the period’s upper echelon of fine art. Despite this, she juggled her styles as well as her commissioned and noncommissioned work, including art for Maxwell House Coffee advertisements, Saturday Evening Post covers, Associated American Artists lithographs, and commercial textile designs. In addition to her painting, she taught at many institutions and in 1947 published a layman’s instructional guide entitled Painting for Enjoyment. Her persistence and openness to all forms of artistic activity, embracing opportunities that others might have disdained, is yet another characteristic of a modern woman artist. The various alternative paths Lee traveled through the art world signal a distinct strategy: she did not rest on laurels when they came, but was nimble and energetic in a rapidly changing environment. By the mid-1940s, her style began to focus into a hard-edged, flattened minimalism as she produced work like Oranges and Avocados that opened the way for the 118

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next, and final, phase in her career. In her increasingly abstract work, Lee retained many aspects from her earlier career—friendly forms, rural subjects, and uncomplicated compositions—but now with the addition of mature emotional underpinnings. As her health forced her into semiretirement in the 1960s, her late work embodies a calm serenity and even, at times, a melancholic mood. She curtailed the chaos of working in so many veins at the same time and focused on broad fields of color and arranged geometries. These late, more self-assured works hum like a personal melody she had been composing and rehearsing her whole career. The tune, as always with Lee’s work, is engaging and accessible, and one that invites me, and every viewer, to hum along. NOTES 1.  The catalogue for the exhibition Simple Pleasures: The Art of Doris Lee is the first significant publication on the artist: Barbara L. Jones, John Fagg, Melissa Wolfe, and Tom Wolf, Simple Pleasures: The Art of Doris Lee (London: Giles in Association with the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, 2020). 2.  Lucille E. Morehouse, “In the World of Art,” Indianapolis Sunday Star, December 8, 1935, 5. 3.  “Doris Lee: An American Painter with a Humorous Sense of Violence,” Life, September 20, 1937, 33.

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ALAN WALLACH

PHILIP EVERGOOD b. 1901, New York, New York d. 1973, Bridgewater, Connecticut

Philip Evergood: Universal Connotation

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HEN I WAS ABOUT NINE , I discovered Oliver Larkin’s mon-

umental Art and Life in America discreetly tucked into my parents’ bookcase. I had no interest in reading Larkin’s vast, Pulitzer Prize–winning tome, but I was eager to look at pictures. Working my way through the book, I happened upon a full-page blackand-white reproduction: Philip Evergood’s My Forebears Were Pioneers, painted in 1939. I was mesmerized. Three huge, downed trees point toward a Victorian mansion in the background. One of the trees has fallen into its roof. In the foreground, a starving dog crouches next to a rocking chair in which an ancient woman, Bible in hand and dressed in the finery of another century, looks toward the viewer. What could this fantastic image mean? The title provided a clue. I imagined the scene to be set somewhere out west—Oklahoma or Nebraska—in what I took to be the land of pioneers. Years later, I discovered professional critics’ responses to the painting. Elizabeth McCausland, writing in 1939, considered it a “mordant comment” and claimed that the woman in the rocking chair was “of the character typified by the phrase ‘D.A.R.’ ” (i.e., a stodgy, conservative superpatriot).1 Larkin, writing in 1949, suggested that the old lady possessed “unspeakable courage.”2 Dore Ashton, reviewing Evergood’s 1960 retrospective 120

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figure 59 Philip Evergood, My Forebears Were Pioneers, 1939. Oil on canvas, 50 × 36 in. Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia. University purchase, GMOA 1974.3190. Courtesy of ACA Galleries, New York.

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at the Whitney Museum of American Art, pegged the artist as “a protestant spirit that never wearied of or flinched from pointing out the moral deficiencies of the world.” According to Ashton, My Forebears Were Pioneers condemned “the decadent rich . . . who have forgotten their civic responsibilities.”3 But could the painting in fact be subtler, more sympathetic? Evergood himself said he was inspired by the sight of “an old lady sitting there on her lawn” while he was driving from Cape Cod to New York shortly after the New England hurricane of 1938. And, characteristically, he denied that the painting was meant to record a “topical” subject: “I feel very conscious when I develop a theme that it must have universal connotations before I want to put it down in paint.”4 As with so much of Evergood’s output, the meaning of My Forebears Were Pioneers cannot be neatly resolved. Indeed, trying to pigeonhole his art, as Ashton attempted to do by portraying him as a moralizing social realist, inevitably proves futile. Evergood resisted labels such as “social realist,” “surrealist,” and “expressionist.” The most he would concede was that he was a “social painter.”5 And yet, even that label doesn’t entirely accord with the strain of fantasy that frequently appears in his work. Evergood enjoyed mainly positive reviews in the mainstream as well as the left-wing press. Although he was a member of the American Communist Party and active in the short-lived Artists Union, his closeness to the party did little damage to his career. According to curator and museum director John Baur, from 1940 on, Evergood was “represented in virtually every important annual and biennial in the country.”6 While the artist was alive, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, and other major American art museums acquired examples of his work. Since his death in 1973, Evergood’s reputation has faded. One reason for this decline is that unlike other social and social realist artists of his period, such as Ben Shahn and Jack Levine, Evergood created works that at first often confound the viewer. Growing up in England, Evergood studied at Eton, Cambridge, and the Slade School. Moving to New York in 1923, he enrolled for a year at the Art Students League, where he studied with George Luks. He then went to Paris to study at the Académie Julian and with the printmaker Stanley William Hayter at Atelier 17. He was an apt student and, by the end of his training, a virtuoso draftsman. But, as his friend and fellow communist Oliver Larkin observed, Evergood “never sought to adapt the end to the means.”7 Evergood could draw upon a wide range of techniques in accord with the subject matter he chose and the mood or emotion he wished to convey. His oils and watercolors could be rough and blotchy or spare and precise. The same can be said of his drawings and prints. As the artist explained to the Daily Worker in 1946, he aimed at creating a humanist art for the working class.8 He also acknowledged that viewing his work required effort. “Liking an artist’s creation,” he said, “comes with familiarity with his work—with growing to understand it.” To this he added a characteristic zinger directed at the milieus in which painting was usually viewed, criticized, and sold: “Snap judgments are for the socialite, not for the profound student of art.”9 Still, Evergood did not make it easy even for “the profound student of art.” His work overflows with contradictions. The humanist who would create an art of universal connotations 122

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figure 60 Philip Evergood, Through the Mill, 1940. Oil and ink on canvas, 36 ⁵/₁₆ × 52 ⁵/₁₆ in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Museum purchase, 41.24. Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art; licensed by Scala/Art Resource, New York. Courtesy of ACA Galleries, New York.

was a master of caricature and parody, producing on occasion works that were simultaneously serious and comic and sometimes bawdy. Moreover, his paintings often evince a deliberate vulgarity, a taste for the ugly as well as the beautiful, for loud and clashing colors, for distortions of form and space. Like so many of his modernist confrères, he was interested in art that was “naive,” and he often resorted to a deliberately “primitive” artistic vocabulary. In The Success and Failure of Picasso, John Berger argued that Picasso succeeded when he found his subjects.10 This argument also holds for Evergood. I could cite dozens of successful paintings, drawings, and prints, but I will limit my comments to one of Evergood’s most famous works, Through the Mill. Likely inspired by textile mills he saw on the same New England trip that resulted in My Forebears Were Pioneers, it was completed in 1940 and purchased by the Whitney a year later. In his 1975 monograph on the artist, John Baur wrote of this painting that “though it details the drudgery of factory work in the vignettes glimpsed through every one of the forty-odd windows [of the mill], it is a picture of such human warmth, buoyancy, and humor—and of such essential truth to the American scene—that it wakes a nostalgia today for those vanishing New England mill towns which were nearly beautiful in their ugliness.”11 The painting itself belies Baur’s upbeat description. The title phrase “through the mill” signifies hardship or rough treatment, which is what these workers and their families daily PHILIP EVERGOOD

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endured. Evergood underlines not only working-class resilience but also the camaraderie and everydayness of mill town life—people chatting, a girl riding a bicycle, a small child holding her mother’s hand. A closer look reminds us of the socioeconomic system within which the workers are caught. Evergood portrays the endless round of shift work: one shift leaves the mills and climbs the steep hill toward the railroad station while another is about to head downhill to work. The mills themselves, one darker than the other, wall in more than half the scene. The statue of an especially bellicose World War I soldier symbolizes patriotism, and the simple church in the distance religion. The monotonous, cramped company housing contrasts with the mansion on the hill built with profits extracted from the millworkers’ toil. Finally, an aged man with a cane makes his way up the street toward the sunset. This bent-over survivor of decades of labor has, as Evergood’s title suggests, gone “through the mill.” Evergood aspired to, in his words, the “prodigious feat of combining art, modernity, and humanity.”12 The extent to which he succeeded is remarkable. At a time when the Left in the United States is enjoying a resurgence, Evergood’s work—the work of a “social painter”— deserves, indeed demands, our attention.13 NOTES 1.  Elizabeth McCausland, “Exhibitions in New York,” Parnassus 11, no. 5 (1939), 21. 2.  Oliver Larkin, Art and Life in America (New York: Rinehart, 1949), 441. 3.  Dore Ashton, “Art: Evergood Exhibition,” New York Times, April 6, 1960. 4.  Cited in John I. H. Baur, Philip Evergood (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1975), 47, 50. 5.  See Philip Evergood, “Sure I’m a Social Painter,” Magazine of Art 36 (November 1943), 254–259. 6.  Baur, Philip Evergood, 206. 7.  Oliver Larkin, “The Humanist Realism of Philip Evergood,” in Twenty Years of Evergood (New York: ACA Gallery and Simon & Schuster, 1946), 17. 8.  See Beth McHenry, “Philip Evergood Chooses His Audience: The American Working Class,” Daily Worker, May 3, 1946, cited in Jody Patterson, “ ‘Marx on the Wall’: Muralism and Anglo-American Exchange during the 1930s,” Tate Papers 27 (Spring 2017), https://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/tate-papers/27 /muralism-and-anglo-american-exchange. 9.  Undated, unpublished essay, cited by Kendall Taylor, Philip Evergood: Never Separate from the Heart (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1987), 192. 10.  John Berger, Success and Failure of Picasso (1965; New York: Vintage, 1993). 11.  Baur, Philip Evergood, 36. 12.  Cited in Larkin, “Humanist Realism of Philip Evergood,” 16. 13.  My thanks to Patricia Hills for her critical reading of the manuscript and expert advice; to Rodney Olsen for his keen editorial eye; and, as always, to Phyllis Rosenzweig for timely criticism and encouragement.

FOR FURTHER READING Baur, John I. H. Philip Evergood. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1975. Larkin, Oliver. “The Humanist Realism of Philip Evergood.” In Twenty Years of Evergood. New York: ACA Gallery and Simon & Schuster, 1946. Taylor, Kendall. Philip Evergood: Never Separate from the Heart. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1987.

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RANDALL C. GRIFFIN

ERNEST L. BLUMENSCHEIN b. 1874, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania d. 1960, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Ernest Blumenschein: Humanizing the Other

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overlooked today and pigeonholed as a middlebrow painter of the American West. As I will argue in this essay, he made a singular contribution to the art of the United States, and his paintings deserve more scholarly examination and wider appreciation. Blumenschein stands apart for several reasons. As a member of the Taos Society of Artists (1915–27), he played an important role in remaking and rejuvenating the myth of the American Southwest by conjuring a premodern American West, one without cowboys, gunfights, or marauding Indians. Instead, his paintings depict Native Americans dressed in brilliant colors and in harmony with the wild landscape that surrounds them. He embraced a lifelong allegiance to craft and tradition, ideas central to the Beaux Arts training he received in Paris. His works are also self-consciously modern, with passages of bold abstract patterns. Moreover, his interest in evoking the emotions and inner visions of his subjects made him a late symbolist. Although his paintings exoticize, they also humanize, showing the world through the eyes of his indigenous subjects. They also often depict people engaging in a complex negotiation of identity, such as fusing the beliefs of the colonizing Spanish with their own spiritual practices. RNEST L. BLUMENSCHEIN IS GENERALLY

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figure 61 Ernest L. Blumenschein, Superstition, 1921. Oil on canvas, 46 × 44 ¾ in. The Collection of Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma. Gift of the Thomas Gilcrease Foundation, 1955, 0137.531. © Gilcrease Museum.

For this essay, I have selected two of Blumenschein’s finest pictures in order to illustrate the range of his work. The first, Superstition (1921), is his most modern picture.1 It is dominated by a shaman-like figure with an eagle feather tied to his hair and turquoise earrings.2 He holds a blackware wedding vase, which identifies him as a member of a New Mexico pueblo. The contrast between the viscerally three-dimensional vases and the flat, abstract background is an example of Blumenschein’s coupling of academic training with modernism. Another signature feature of his work is his tightly structured compositions, and this painting’s composition is bound together by repeated colors and shapes. The central figure’s 126

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pyramidal form is echoed in the fantastical mountains in the left background, which tie him to nature. Blumenschein engaged repeatedly with the New Mexican landscape in his art, as it fed his imagination. Here he has included a mauve-colored representation of Taos Mountain in the lower left. Much of the painting’s background resembles a modernist tapestry, with undulating black, red, orange, and blue lines jostling with one another. That passage may be a colorful nod to cubism, which Blumenschein knew from the 1913 Armory Show exhibition in New York City.3 The three main focal points in Superstition are the man, the wooden crucifix on the right, and the mask on the left, which is reminiscent of masks from the American Southwest and Mexico. The way the man’s face mirrors the mask exoticizes him; his otherness is emphasized by his angry, confrontational expression and by the way he has fused Christianity with indigenous beliefs. We tend to forget how the titles of works of art can inflect their meanings. In this case, the word superstition implies that this man’s religious beliefs are founded on ignorance. After the collector Thomas Gilcrease bought Superstition, Blumenschein wrote him about the painting: “The Indian’s mind is partly made up by Medicine Men who are often fakers who play off on all superstitions that come into life—and in addition he has the religion of the white man which he gets from a priest that is not always conscientious.”4 Yet, notwithstanding its condescending title, Superstition can be read very differently. As several scholars have noted, Blumenschein was a staunch advocate for the preservation of Native American cultures and knew that the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs was trying to efface their unique tribal identities in an effort to assimilate them.5 Blumenschein wrote that “the Indian is being gradually weaned away from his dress, his dance, his blanket and his pottery.”6 An ardent supporter of Native American arts, Blumenschein argued that “the art of the Indian is not only beautiful but it is unique. Originality is a priceless donation to all human endeavor and the aboriginal American has actually contributed more to the arts than two hundred years of ‘civilized’ occupation of North America has produced.”7 Despite the U.S. government’s threats to Native American culture, we can see that the man in Superstition appears to be defending or upholding his culture. He holds a prized Pueblo vase, from which two visions emerge: a Native American dancer, who is emblematic of Pueblo arts and religion, and a sheaf of what appears to be wheat, which was a staple of Pueblo diets. In his letter to Gilcrease, Blumenschein also wrote that “I tried to paint the Indian friend’s feelings—and mabey [sic] my own,” as if the man in the scene were a surrogate for the painter himself.8 The scene is imbued with mystical resonance. In classic symbolist fashion, Superstition explores the sitter’s subjectivity, and it allows us to see his fantastical inner vision. Perhaps with the aid of peyote, he has breached the boundary between the physical and spiritual domains.9 Blumenschein may have included the swastika above the man’s head as a symbol of divine spirituality. Therefore, a fundamental tension underlies Superstition, which offers a contradictory message, at once disparaging and extolling. Ultimately, its principal message is the need to defend Native American cultural autonomy. When one turns from Superstition to Blumenschein’s Jury for Trial of a Sheepherder for Murder (1936), it suddenly becomes apparent how wide-ranging his oeuvre was.10 If Superstition is ERNEST L. BLUMENSCHEIN

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figure 62 Ernest L. Blumenschein, Jury for Trial of a Sheepherder for Murder, 1936. Oil on canvas, 46 × 30 in. The Rockwell Museum, Corning, New York. Clara S. Peck Fund, 97.13F.

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fantastical and exoticizing, the latter work, while naturalistic and humanizing, is equally innovative. Jury for Trial is one of the masterworks of American art from the 1930s, and Blumenschein considered it his finest painting.11 The scene was inspired by the trial of a seventeen-year-old Hispanic shepherd who had killed a tourist near Red River, New Mexico, on August 28, 1927. Compared to trials depicted in films, television, novels, and other art, Blumenschein’s scene is conspicuous for omitting the judge, lawyers, and defendant.12 He could easily have created a dramatic scene of a key moment in the trial, but instead chose to focus solely on the twelve jurors, all poor Hispanic men. Their monumental figures nearly fill the frame. Wearing their Sunday best clothes, the men appear solemn and weighed down by responsibility. Like Superstition, Jury for Trial is made cohesive by its repeated shapes and colors. The earth colors of browns, tans, grays, and yellows dominate the image, with enlivening spots of brighter orange, red, and green. The vertical forms of the men create a regular rhythm across the canvas that is echoed in the line of their shoes. The well-lit men in the front row stand out, but it is the older man second from the right who is the scene’s main focal point. His large head and tangible form are situated slightly closer to our space than the other figures, and the blackclad figure on his right makes his paler form more pronounced. One might naturally assume that the men in the scene are portraits of the actual jury, but Blumenschien based them on “mountain types” he sketched in Taos, and he substituted the interior of his Taos studio for the real courtroom.13 Most of the jurors look to the court reporter, who appears to be recording the words of the judge or attorneys. On the opposite side of the canvas an enigmatic visitor, who wears round glasses that resemble Blumenschein’s, peers at us, while a reproduction of Gilbert Stuart’s iconic portrait of George Washington crowns the scene, personifying American selfhood and white privilege in a striking counterpoint to the jurors. Those men were living in a world without running water or electricity, so there was a wide gulf between them and mainstream American society. Crowded into a small space, the jurors look uncomfortable, yet they still fulfill their duty.14 The power of the painting resides in its liminality. All of those men were members of the Penitentes brotherhood, a confraternity that had been outlawed by the Catholic Church for reenacting Christ’s crucifixion each Lent. The jurors’ Hispanic culture is alluded to by the horizontal vigas in the ceiling above them, which invoke the Spanish colonial churches they esteem. The scene encourages us to reflect on what constitutes “America,” and the blank portrait of George Washington may be understood as an ironic acknowledgment of the nation’s marginalization of poor Hispanics, which has made them similarly faceless and anonymous. By privileging the jurors, Blumenschein created a remarkable group portrait that both humanizes its subjects and proclaims their legitimacy as full-fledged Americans. Jury for Trial still seems truthful and fresh today. No work from that period is more relevant for us, because it recognizes the socioeconomic disparities without turning the jurors into pitiable victims. Seen together, Blumenschein’s paintings illuminate the full spectrum of the humanity of Native Americans and Hispanic residents of the southwestern United States. For that reason alone, Blumenschein achieved something singular, and thus deserves to be elevated in stature as an artist. ERNEST L. BLUMENSCHEIN

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NOTES 1.  For a strong reading of Superstition, see Skip K. Miller, “Superstition and the Artist’s Defense of Native Rights,” in Peter H. Hassrick and Elizabeth Cunningham, eds., In Contemporary Rhythm: The Art of Ernest L. Blumenschein (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 119–127. 2.  Blumenschein’s friend and fishing companion Jim Romero served as the model for the figure in Superstition. See Miller, “Superstition and the Artist’s Defense of Native Rights,” 120. 3.  According to Skip K. Miller, the abstract background was inspired by “Navajo and Hispanic Rio Grande blanket designs.” See ibid., 121. 4.  Quoted in Peter H. Hassrick, “Chasing Rainbows: Taos in the 1920s,” in Hassrick and Cunningham, In Contemporary Rhythm, 140, 144. 5.  For scholars who have discussed Blumenschein’s preservationist beliefs, see Miller, “Superstition and the Artist’s Defense of Native Rights,” 119–127; Sascha T. Scott, A Strange Mixture: The Art and Politics of Painting Pueblo Indians (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015), 90–101; Hassrick, “Chasing Rainbows,” 144, 156, 182; and Patricia J. Broder, Taos: A Painter’s Dream (Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1980), 74–75. 6.  Ernest L. Blumenschein and Bert G. Phillips, “Appreciation of Indian Art,” El Palacio 6 (May 1919): 179, quoted in Broder, Taos: A Painter’s Dream, 74. 7.  Ibid. 8.  Quoted in Hassrick, “Chasing Rainbows,” 140. 9.  Blumenschein was aware of the Peyote Cult, which was organized by a group of younger members of the Taos Pueblo. See Hassrick, “Chasing Rainbows,” 136–138. 10.  For the deepest reading of Jury for the Trial of a Sheepherder for Murder, see James Moore, “Twelve Men Listening: Blumenschein’s Struggle with Murder, Justice, and the Inarticulate Soul of America,” in Hassrick and Cunningham, In Contemporary Rhythm, 290–303. 11.  Ibid., 295. 12.  James Moore compares Blumenschein’s Jury for the Trial with contemporary paintings and drawings of trials. See ibid., 300–302. 13.  Elizabeth J. Cunningham, “Blumenschein, Modernism, and National Art in the 1930s,” in Hassrick and Cunningham, In Contemporary Rhythm, 236. See also Moore, “Twelve Men Listening,” 296–297. 14.  The jury’s verdict was that the shepherd was guilty of second-degree murder, but the judge ignored the verdict and sentenced him to ninety to ninety-nine years in the penitentiary. See Moore, “Twelve Men Listening,” 294.

FOR FURTHER READING Broder, Patricia J. Taos: A Painter’s Dream. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1980. Eldredge, Charles C. “Ernest Blumenschein’s The Peacemaker: Native Americans, Greeks, and Jurisprudence circa 1913.” American Art 15, no. 1 (Spring 2001): 34–51. Hassrick, Peter H., and Elizabeth Cunningham, eds. In Contemporary Rhythm: The Art of Ernest L. Blumenschein. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008. Scott, Sascha T. A Strange Mixture: The Art and Politics of Painting Pueblo Indians. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015.

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REBECCA ZURIER

FREDERICK C. FLEMISTER b. 1917, Jackson, Georgia d. 1976, New York, New York

Frederick Flemister: Portrait of the Artist Claiming History

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on the top floor of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture requires a journey that begins in the constricted rooms in the lower level of the building’s stacked, inverted pyramids. These spaces present a story of pain, endurance, and a demand for justice told through broadening displays of artifacts on ascending levels that chronicle Black achievement in many arenas and set a context for the art displayed above. Escalators move toward skylit spaces that open out into rooms of modern art, presented as the culmination of a history of struggle; a visitor gravitates toward the color of large abstractions by MacArthur Binion and Ed Clark and a full-length figure by Amy Sherald, as if taking in light and air. Amid historical works in adjacent rooms, the mood changes and requires attention to one small, framed picture at a time. Disrupting all this is the gaze emanating from a jewel-toned selfportrait by Frederick C. Flemister. Framed within the frame by a faux-stone architectural window, the figure looks out with an almost bemused expression. In the background extends a landscape of pale fields and hills, with one perpendicular, stylized tree neatly visible just beyond the sitter’s left sleeve. The figure’s pose, setting, and confident attitude, as well as its finely painted O REACH THE ART GALLERIES

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figure 63 Frederick C. Flemister, Self-Portrait, 1941. Oil on canvas, 30 ¼ × 24 ¹/₈ in. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. Gift of Robert L. Johnson, 2015.2.1.

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technique, deliberately invoke the look of Renaissance-era European portraits in oil. However, while the conventions used in depicting magistrates, princes, and merchants usually implied that the sitter owns the estate pictured in the distance, this portrait of an African American artist radiates self-possession; it brings past and present together while claiming for its subject a place within an art history extending back to Leonardo, and reworks that history for the artist’s own purpose. Alain Locke, a supporter of Flemister’s work, had once advised Black artists to look to the “legacy of the ancestral arts” from Africa, and later to contemporary realism, but Flemister’s paintings establish a heritage within art traditions that had theretofore depicted people of color at the margins.1 Black portraiture has the power to make cultural claims about the importance of its subject. It sets its own terms for regarding the sitter, offering alternatives to the degrading or exoticizing images that traditionally circulated around African American people while also challenging the association, in the West, of fine art with whiteness. As Amy Mooney, Jeffrey Stewart, and other scholars have explained, portraiture could both demonstrate and contribute to an understanding of Black interiority. At the same time, portraiture—as a means of self-fashioning—communicates through calibrated ostentation and display. To this end, costume can function to declare what Richard Powell terms a Black subject’s “sense of pride and exhibitionism,” or “cutting a figure.”2 These modes of artful self-presentation come together in Flemister’s self-portrait through the sitter’s calm gaze and his garb that fuses historical and contemporary dress. His smock could be a tunic, while the oversized green hat suggests both the archaic headgear worn by fifteenth-century noblemen and a contemporary applejack or newsboy cap. All of these concepts—costume, self-presentation, the invocation of Black interiority—contribute to the portrait’s meaning. Flemister’s engagement with art and art history was hard won, in a career conducted mainly within historically Black institutions. A fellow student, Robert Neal, reminisced about Flemister, who was born in Georgia in 1917, living in the Summerhill “ghetto” of Atlanta. Almost every reference in print describes a notable artistic talent, but the documents are few. His education may have been interrupted over the years; he did not graduate from the Laboratory High School at Atlanta University until 1940, when he was in his early twenties. Hayward Oubre, who studied alongside Flemister, recalled: “I was amazed at his ability. . . . Fred would paint for hours, but, sometimes, he would stop and listen to great music, in the music department he would play records. . . . Something motivates highly talented people that the average person cannot understand.”3 By that time Flemister’s work had already attracted plaudits, and it soon won awards: first prize at the American Negro Exhibition held in Chicago in 1940, purchase prizes at the annual exhibitions of Negro Art held at Atlanta University, and publication in early surveys of African American art by Alain Locke and James Porter. Although Porter criticized Flemister—as a “consciously naïve artist” who “often resorts to stereotype subjects, imitates the forms and textures of bygone styles, and even grossly exaggerates human expression,” while “the facility of his technic makes him almost a curiosity among the less experienced practitioners in the field”—he nonetheless acknowledged that Flemister had produced “paintings of extraordinary force.”4 FREDERICK C. FLEMISTER

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The study of “bygone styles” was integral to the education that Flemister received in Atlanta in the circle around the artist-teacher Hale Aspacio Woodruff, who in 1931 had been recruited to shape the art department at Atlanta University.5 The Atlanta University Center served as a hub of African American educational institutions, including Morehouse and Spelman Colleges; a graduate program, the Laboratory School, that trained teachers in the university’s education department; and art classes that Woodruff opened to the local community. Students in all these programs seem to have shared resources. Woodruff brought in exhibitions of contemporary art from the Whitney Museum, African American art from the Harmon Foundation, and African sculpture from local collections. He expanded the university library’s holdings of art reproductions and eventually founded an annual exhibition of Black art. Although he was known for encouraging students to depict the local scene—their excursions to impoverished neighborhoods earned them the sobriquet “outhouse school”— Woodruff also fought to persuade the High Museum of Art in Atlanta to break its whitesonly policy and allow his students to study there. In the words of Hayward Oubre, he “refused to let Jim Crow deny his students.”6 A sense of hard-won art history also informs the other known paintings that Flemister made, both in Atlanta and after he earned a scholarship to the program at Woodruff’s alma mater, the John Herron Art Institute in Indianapolis. Man with a Brush (ca. 1941) is another costumed self-portrait, here with a more mannerist look conveyed through wrought and rippling forms; the energetic clouds also suggest those in the work of Thomas Hart Benton. It was not unusual at the time for white artists—such as Paul Cadmus, Grant Wood, Reginald Marsh, or Benton—to ironically appropriate techniques and styles from the Old Masters to depict contemporary subjects. For a Black artist to do so changed the stakes. An interest in bringing present-day African American life and past art history together informs Flemister’s recasting of religious imagery with contemporary social commentary on lynching, a subject known all too well to a Black man in the South. In combining a tree and noose with a Pietà-like figure grieving over the body of a Black man, The Mourners (ca. 1942) fits with both artistic traditions and those of the Black church through what Kymberly Pinder terms “the conflation of Christ’s suffering with racial oppression,” in which “Christ’s own difference, for which he was persecuted, becomes a source of empathy and identity for the African-American.”7 Such associations inspired the work of other socially conscious artists at the time. Setting Flemister’s apart is the deliberate reference not only to biblical subject matter but to compositions and paint-handling evocative of historical religious painting, here less the rectilinear composure of Renaissance portraiture than intense, spiraling compositions deployed by El Greco and other sixteenth- and seventeenth-century artists. Past and present interweave more provocatively in a variation on The Mourners, at one time part of the historic Barnett-Aden collection of African American art. Here the figures normally associated with the Descent from the Cross merge with a Nativity scene as they gather reverently around the body of a child; angels contort in the sky above them and a horse and cart descend from the heavens. The object of their devoted attention is not a crèche but a small coffin, opened to reveal a child’s face. This oscillation between the birth 134

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figure 64 Frederick C. Flemister, Man with a Brush, ca. 1941. Oil on canvas, 25 ¾ × 20 ⁵/₈ in. Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, 1950.012.

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figure 65 Frederick C. Flemister, The Mourners, ca. 1942. Oil on canvas, 39 ¾ × 31 ¼ in. Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, 1942.002.

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and death of a young Black man is wrenching, as if an early premonition of the mourners who later visited the open casket of Emmett Till or viewed it in photographs. In both cases, the images focus on the death of a Black youth and a mother’s sorrow that envelops all who observe.8 Flemister’s studies in Indianapolis were interrupted by his military service at Camp Lee, Virginia, where he may have assisted Woodruff in painting a mural. At some point he worked alongside Woodruff as a teaching assistant in Atlanta. His art continued to win awards for a few more years, but the paper trail quickly ends. Tina Dunkley’s research records the artist’s relocation to New York City around 1946, his employment as a “grinder at a grinding factory” and as a mail carrier, and his death in 1976—but almost no paintings after he left Atlanta. The self-portrait now in Washington was acquired from the artist by the Barnett-Aden Gallery in 1943 and eventually was purchased by the Smithsonian for its National Museum of African American History and Culture. There it attracts new visitors and invites consideration of the many histories to which it might belong. NOTES 1.  Alain Locke, “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” in Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1925), 254. 2.  Richard J. Powell, Cutting a Figure: Fashioning Black Portraiture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 3.  The most thorough biography is in Tina Dunkley, “News & Reviews: In Search of a Lost Artist,” International Review of African American Art 16, no. 1 (1999): 61–62. In addition to the exhibitions listed by Dunkley, Flemister participated in one organized by Hale Woodruff at the J.B. Speed Museum in Louisville, 1943. Robert Neal and Hayward Oubre quoted in Winifred L. Stoelting, “Hale Woodruff, Artist and Teacher: Through the Atlanta Years,” PhD diss., Emory University, 1978, 82. 4.  James Porter, Modern Negro Art (New York: Dryden Press, 1943), 131. See also Alain Locke’s references to the artist in essays for The Exposition of the Art of the American Negro, 1851–1940 (Chicago: Tanner Art Galleries, 1940) and The Negro Artist Comes of Age (Albany, NY: Albany Institute of History and Art, 1945). 5.  For Woodruff’s teaching and resources for his students, see Stoelting, “Hale Woodruff, Artist and Teacher.” 6.  “Outhouse school” was coined in “Black Beaux Arts,” Time, September 21, 1942, 74; an early drawing by Flemister in this mode appears in Margery Wheeler Brown, “A Letter to High School Art Students,” Design Magazine 40, no. 7 (1939): 18; Oubre interviewed by David Driskell, in Amalia K. Amaki and Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, Hale Woodruff, Nancy Elizabeth Prophet, and the Academy (Atlanta: Spelman College, 2007), 29. 7.  Kymberly Pinder, Painting the Gospel: Public Art and Religion in Chicago (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2016), 8–10. 8.  Flemister’s interpretations correspond to the tendency among African American artists in the period to emphasize the sorrow rather than the brutality of lynching. Margaret R. Vendryes, “Hanging on These Walls: An Art Commentary on Lynching, the Forgotten 1935 Exhibition,” in Race Consciousness: African-American Studies for the New Century, ed. Judith Jackson Fossett and Jeffrey A. Tucker (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 153–176. On the cultural resonance of Pietà references in the United States, see Rubia C. Tapia, American Pietàs: Visions of Race, Death, and the Maternal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).

FREDERICK C. FLEMISTER

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SHIPU WANG

MIKI HAYAKAWA b. 1899, Nemuro, Hokkaido, Japan; to United States, 1908 d. 1953, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Miki Hayakawa: Portraying Interiority

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One Afternoon was unforgettable. As I approached the painting hanging inside the New Mexico Museum of Art’s vault, it felt as if I had walked in on someone’s private moment, compelling me to hush, so as not to disturb the stillness of the scene. Enveloped by warm hues, the large canvas drew me into a space of softness made up of meticulously layered brushstrokes. The delicate, interweaving brushwork imbues everything with nuanced colors and shimmering quietness, from the bowl of fruits, to the prone man on a striped pillow, absorbed in reading scattered newspapers, to the woodstove in the corner. The pot of calla lilies in full bloom—with outstretched green leaves, white spathes, and yellow spadices—punctuates a mellow interior scene with animated gesticulation. Tonally luscious, texturally alluring, and emotionally ambivalent, the enigmatic painting has remained a percolating source for contemplation since my first viewing in 2014. The ambiguity of the painting results from its deceptive straightforwardness and mixed messages. Hayakawa’s careful variation of values and edges conveys the physicality of the figure. Yet the artist’s intricate brushwork, along with a generous use of foreshortening that brings everything up to the picture Y FIRST ENCOUNTER WITH MIKI HAYAKAWA’S

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figure 66 Miki Hayakawa, One Afternoon, ca. 1935. Oil on canvas, 40 × 40 in. Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art. Gift of Preston McCrossen in memory of his wife, the artist, 1954 (520.23P). Photo by Blair Clark.

plane, gives the scene an ethereal, lulling quality. It is compositionally open, while appearing to be closed off in its depiction of a private moment. And as warm and inviting as the painting’s formal elements are, the man’s turned-away face and body refuse a viewer’s potential access to either his identity or any visible expressions. The image thus appears to be intimate but distant, accessible yet inscrutable. As my rediscovery of more than sixty widely dispersed Hayakawa works revealed, One Afternoon is one in a series of portraits from the 1930s, all depicting the same man— “Edward,” said to be her boyfriend at the time. He always appears to be absorbed in his own world: sawing a plank in Worker (ca. 1936, collection of Richard Sakai), playing a ukulele MIKI HAYAKAWA

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figure 67 Miki Hayakawa, Music, ca. 1934. Oil on canvas, 36 × 34 in. Collection of Ross Anderson. Photo: Trey Bailey.

against a patterned backdrop in an untitled portrait (ca. 1934, Monterey Museum of Art), or sitting at a table in the undated Music (ca. 1934). The recurring man does not appear to serve any allegorical purposes, nor do the ukulele and sheet music function as narrative devices. But showing the same person in various states of concentration, solitude, and disengagement (from the viewer and, by implication, the artist) do make these portraits of introspection rather ambivalent suggestions of the relationship between artist and model.1 The consistent inscrutability of the man in these paintings is unusual, given that Hayakawa tended, in her other extant portraits, to prefer quarter or frontal views of her sitters. She often depicted her models, of different genders and ethnicities, with much care and 140

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empathy, such that they seem as openly engaging as possible. Her Portrait of a Negro (ca. 1926, Los Angeles County Museum of Art) and other prewar paintings show the artist’s attentiveness to deploying an intricate play of tonality and shapes to build painterly forms. It is as if Hayakawa were trying to bring to the fore the inner qualities of her sitters by painting the portraits from the inside out, creating faces and especially eyes that seem to emanate light from within. Leaving visible her deliberate brushwork, Hayakawa’s paintings assume a sense of fluidity, as if one could see her models’ pulsating energy manifesting on the surface of the canvas. These portraits indicate the artist’s genuine interest in the people in front of her, and her attempt to capture and reveal who they really were (at least in her interpretation) in an honest and loving way. Emotionally private by comparison, the highly personal One Afternoon turned out to be Hayakawa’s most public work, one that she was apparently proud of, exhibiting it many times. The labels on the painting’s verso indicate that it was displayed at the Golden Gate International Exposition in 1939–40. Earlier in 1935, Hayakawa had submitted it—along with From My Window (1935, collection of Sandra and Bram Dijkstra), a meticulously constructed landscape depicting a view of the newly completed Coit Tower—to the San Francisco Museum of Art’s opening exhibition in 1935, a show in which she was the only Japanese woman among the dozens of participating artists (and the twelve artists of Asian descent). The two works served, in effect, as the representative pieces of her decades-long status as an active member of the San Francisco Bay Area art communities. In fact, Hayakawa kept One Afternoon with her even when the mass dislocation and incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II forced her to leave California. She displayed it front and center in her solo show at the New Mexico Museum of Art in 1944, and after her death the painting was donated to the museum by her husband, artist Preston McCrossen. This history suggests the painting’s personal significance to the artist. Finding One Afternoon in the museum’s permanent collection illuminated Hayakawa’s role as an active member of the Santa Fe art colony in the postwar years. But piecing together her life and oeuvre proved to be a challenging task. Published biographical information was scant and discrepant prior to my research, which involved combing through exhibition catalogues, art association membership rolls, federal census records, and Japanese American wartime registration and relocation databases. From what I could gather emerged a portrait of an artist who not only was determined to make art, but who was also dedicated to being an integral part of her local art communities, wherever she might be. Existing records suggest that Hayakawa was a daughter of two Japanese immigrants based in Alameda, California, and began her art training at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute) in about 1923. Winning painting prizes early in her study, Hayakawa exhibited almost annually, including holding a solo show of some 150 works at the Golden Gate Institute (Kinmon Gakuen) in 1929, an ambitious display that drew critical acclaim. In Santa Fe she participated in local art shows while maintaining her membership in the San Francisco Art Association, even during wartime. Among Hayakawa’s compatriots in Santa Fe were McCrossen, John Sloan, Alfred Morang, and Bernique Langley. Langley recalled that MIKI HAYAKAWA

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figure 68 Miki Hayakawa, Untitled (Woman with Blue Hair), ca. 1940s. Oil on canvas, 20 × 22 in. The Art Archives of Cold Lightning. Photo: ShiPu Wang.

Hayakawa “enjoyed the assortment of interesting people” living in the Santa Fe art colony and that her “love and delight in people” came through in her portraits. Hayakawa’s good friend, artist William Ford, also fondly remembered her as an excellent artist and gracious person who was beloved: “She was naive yet knowing, a combination of innocence and sophistication.” Ford’s astute observation is also an apt characterization of Hayakawa’s portraiture in general. The brushwork in her portrait of Ford is feathery and hazy, showing a soft, luminous likeness of the subject, whose big, translucent eyes suggest an intriguing interior world. Another portrait, of a young woman in a diaphanous, dotted blouse, shows similar luminosity; her blue eyes, pinkish complexion, and hazel hair make her look almost like a female sibling of Ford. This was, in fact, one of a half dozen portraits of women, likely all produced in Santa Fe, that illustrate Hayakawa’s sustained interest in painting people of all back142

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grounds, and her continuing experimentation with painting techniques. I was delighted to discover that the artist appeared to be shifting from a tighter construction of painterly forms in her California days to a freer handling of paint in her postwar portraits. As the ostensibly unfinished (but signed) portrait of a blue-haired woman reveals, Hayakawa seemed to be moving away from the defined edges and deliberate shading in One Afternoon and instead deploying quicker, more casual brushstrokes to sketch out the hair and body. The face maintains the artist’s signature facets of paint showing nuanced undertones of skin, now in a more blended manner that hides her interweaving brushwork. The result is a seemingly more spontaneous approach to constructing a portrait, creating a stronger visual contrast, and intrigue, previously unseen in her figurative work. It was also curious to discover that Hayakawa created at least one other portrait with a well-formed face (and an intense gaze) on top of a roughly sketched body covered in only a few blotches of color. If such a play of varying forms and negative/positive space in portraiture was indeed what Hayakawa was exploring in the last decade of her life, one wonders what direction she might have taken her art had she not died from an illness in 1953. Had Hayakawa’s numerous works not been sold and dispersed into private collections over the years, but instead entered museums, as did One Afternoon, perhaps the artist would have been more visible today in accounts of twentieth-century American art. NOTES 1.  All sources cited and most of the images discussed in this essay are in my book, The Other American Moderns. Matsura, Ishigaki, Noda, Hayakawa (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2017).

FOR FURTHER READING Karlstrom, Paul J. On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art, 1900–1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Kovinick, Phil, and Marian Yoshiki-Kovinick. An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998. Trenton, Patricia, and Sandra D’Emilio. Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890–1945. Berkeley: Autry Museum of Western Heritage in association with the University of California Press, 1995.

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BRAM DIJKSTRA

BELLE (GOLDSCHLAGER) BARANCEANU b. 1902, Chicago, Illinois d. 1988, La Jolla, California

Belle Baranceanu and Linear Expressionism

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N 1932 DANIEL CATTON RICH ,

future director of the Art Institute of Chicago, praised the painter Anthony Angarola for studying earlier masters such as Giotto, Holbein, and Bruegel instead of slavishly following the still-prevalent focus on impressionist tropes. Angarola’s work exhibited a laudable lack of “interest in the third dimension” and exhibited a close understanding of Giotto’s “supreme genius for arrangement.” Not surprisingly, these elements also defined the dominant compositional concerns of one of Angarola’s star students, Belle Baranceanu. Rich’s article was, in essence, a somewhat belated obituary for Angarola—who, near the end of a yearlong Guggenheim Fellowship in Europe, had been in an auto accident near Paris. Apparently none the worse for wear, he had returned to Chicago, where—though Rich did not mention this—he was about to marry Belle, his former student, who was anxiously waiting to join him. But on August 15, 1929, Angarola was found dead in his Chicago hotel room, felled by an aneurism just before their reunion. Soon after that heartbreaking event, Baranceanu painted a selfportrait in which the ghostly face of her mentor and lover hovers above her. Inside a gray and white oval form, his pale and otherworldly face seems to emanate from a shroud that descends to surround the artist’s

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figure 69 Belle Baranceanu, Leaf Bud, ca. 1925. Oil on canvas, 14 × 16 in. Private collection.

head and shoulders in a pattern of flattened gray shapes. Inside this cocoon, the artist has modulated her own face in an emphatically three-dimensional fashion, in stark contrast to the faintly delineated features of her lover. Centered inside the central section of the painting, she looks straight at us, her coal-dark eyes unflinching, her mouth serious, unsmiling, determined. This self-portrait seems a declaration of independence as well as a memento mori. In her self-portrait Baranceanu harmonizes these parallel intentions in a work of intense expressive sophistication. The artist was born Belle Goldschlager, daughter of a Romanian immigrant couple who settled initially in Chicago, where Belle was born, before relocating to Minnesota. There the young artist attended the Minneapolis College of Art, beginning in 1922. She studied initially with Richard Lahey and Morris Davidson, but was subsequently drawn into the orbit of Angarola, who in 1925 had accepted a one-year teaching position at the school. When he returned to Chicago to teach at the Art Institute, she followed him there. BELLE BARANCEANU

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Angarola’s modern style, linear and angular, made a lasting impression on her. It is not surprising that Belle Goldschlager’s early oil sketches were still dominated by two almost contradictory visual tendencies: explorations of landscapes and cityscapes combining the stylized, angular three-dimensionality of her teacher’s work merged with her attempts to create proto-cubist abstractions based on organic matter. One of the latter, Leaf Bud (ca. 1925), is a heavily abstracted, close-up delineation of plant forms painted about the same time that Georgia O’Keeffe was exploring similar up-close portraits of plants. But where O’Keeffe tended to emphasize the softer, rounded volumes of leaves and flowers, Baranceanu feasted on angles, lines, and folds, making their intersecting patterns the basis for the painting’s emotional, “expressionist” content. One of her semi-urban landscapes, Riverview Section, Chicago (location unknown), was selected by the Art Institute of Chicago for its 1926 annual exhibition of American painting, providing the artist with a substantial professional accolade at the age of twenty-four. That same year she also produced Virginia (ca. 1926, private collection), a startlingly direct, boldly delineated, and very moving character study of a large African American woman. The subject appears to be waiting at a bus or subway stop, clearly tired beyond endurance, her eyes blazing with barely suppressed fury at life’s indignities. This painting, produced during a particularly racist era in American history, was not a surprising subject for the young Jewish painter; during the late 1920s and early 1930s, she often raised critical eyebrows with straightforward portrayals of African American or Asian women, as if daring her viewers to confront the universals of self-identity. Ettilie Wallace, a close friend (and the eventual executrix of the artist’s estate) pointed out that throughout her life Baranceanu had felt a direct kinship with what she saw as the life-affirming spontaneity of women of color. The artist’s father, an Orthodox Jew, rejected his daughter’s romantic relationship with Angarola because he came from an Italian Roman Catholic background. In 1927 he arranged for her to live and work in her uncle’s Los Angeles household. Although his motive was quite transparent, she acquiesced, perhaps already aware of Angarola’s impending Guggenheimsponsored departure for Europe; his absence might make her relocation less painful. As it turned out, Angarola was able to visit her in Los Angeles before taking leave. Angarola’s sudden death had fueled Belle’s anger toward her father’s prejudicial behavior, and she decided to drop his surname and take on her mother’s maiden name instead. She once identified herself, in 1932, as “Belle (Goldschlager) Baranceanu,” but thereafter signed her work only as Baranceanu. She also changed the Goldschlager signatures on earlier works (although she overlooked some, hence the existence even today of several works signed with her former name). The change of venue and the striking beauty of the California landscape proved inspirational and kept her fully engaged. The variegated and then still sparsely populated Los Angeles Hills became her subject matter, leading to some of her most striking and sophisticated, semi-abstracted landscape paintings and lithographs. In these works drawn from nature, she was able to combine her interest in a modernist, vertical linearity with the individual integration of abstract and representational elements explored in her recent organic 146

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figure 70 Belle Baranceanu, Los Angeles Hills, 1929. Oil on board, 17 ½ × 21 ½ in. Collection of Dr. Richard Smith.

abstractions. In a statement for Art of Today, J. Z. Jacobson’s landmark 1933 study of Chicago modernism, she explained these new works as the result of mixed influences from El Greco and Cézanne combined with a distinct emphasis on the expressive qualities of line.1 The result was such works as From Everett Street, Los Angeles (1928, private collection), which she sent to the 1928 Chicago Art Institute American Annual, and the compositional daring of Los Angeles Hills. In this superbly composed suburban landscape, line and volume interact in an entirely new and unexpected manner. The flattened angles and rectangles of the facades of a villa and a warehouse jostle for position in the foreground, only to be overwhelmed by an inexplicable mass of yellow—perhaps the sandy remnants of a typical California landslide? This oddity of nature is itself surrounded by greenery on one side, and a semicircle of suburban villas. A BELLE BARANCEANU

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figure 71 Belle Baranceanu, Lee, ca. 1931. Oil on canvas, 44 × 34 in. Private collection.

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relatively small work, it is one of the most daring modernist compositions produced by any American artist in the 1920s or beyond. Back in Chicago between 1929 and 1932, she maintained a precarious living teaching at the Midwest Art Students League and at several Jewish schools in the city. In 1931 she contributed two paintings to the Art Institute’s annual Chicago and Vicinity exhibition: German Town and Wabash Avenue Bridge (locations of both unknown), the latter being awarded the Clyde M. Carr Prize for outstanding landscape painting. That year she also held a one-person show at the city’s Little Gallery, featuring her landscapes and several of her more controversial nudes. One of the most striking among these was her extraordinarily intimate portrait of Lee. In it the linear expressionism she sought to make her own was blended with her belief that any successful painting must find the intersection between the artist’s eye, her subject, and the viewer’s emotions. In such carefully composed explorations of the nude as Lee, Baranceanu sought to express her overarching belief in the role of human beauty as an expression of the inner spirit. As the Great Depression hit its economic nadir in 1932, she reportedly declared that she had learned from experience that it was easier to be poor in California than in winter-bound Chicago. Therefore, she decided to move back to Los Angeles, only to continue on to San Diego the next year to join her mother and sister, who had moved there before her. In San Diego, under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, Baranceanu began to refocus her work on murals, conscious of the opportunity this gave her to reach a new public. Never a believer in the value of direct political statement, she chose to focus her murals on the beauty inherent in human creativity, in conjunction with the truths to be found in nature. One of her San Diego–period murals, the La Jolla post office’s Scenic View of the Village (1935– 36), though located in a very mundane environment and frequently overlooked, is one of the most beautiful, brilliantly composed and executed works created by anyone during the 1930s. Unfortunately, several of her other important murals of this period were destroyed when tastes changed and the hegemonic rule of postwar abstraction eclipsed other forms of narrative or expressive content. Baranceanu was still alive to witness the destruction of several of her important murals, and it broke her heart—but not her independent spirit, which survived into her final years. In an incident from the early 1980s, when she was in the throes of dementia and consigned to an assisted living facility, she was found wandering nude in the corridors. She merely smiled and declared, “Aphrodite needs no nightie.” NOTES 1.  J. Z. Jacobson, Art of Today: Chicago—1933 (Chicago: L. M. Stein, 1932), 43; quotations not otherwise cited are from the same source.

FOR FURTHER READING Belle Baranceanu: The Artist at Work. San Diego, CA: San Diego Historical Society, 2006. Blair-Brown, Suzanne. “The Prime of Belle Baranceanu.” San Diego Magazine, July 1985, 126–131. Dijkstra, Bram, and Anne Weaver. Belle Baranceanu: A Retrospective (Mandeville Gallery, University of California, San Diego, 1985) (includes extensive bibliography).

BELLE BARANCEANU

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ANNE COLLINS GOODYEAR

CHUZO TAMOTZU b. 1888, Toguchi, Amami Ōshima, Japan; to United States, 1920 d. 1975, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Reclaiming the American Legacy of Chuzo Tamotzu

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ORN IN JAPAN TO A SAMURAI FAMILY ,

Chuzo Tamotzu studied political science as a college student, while also pursuing independent instruction in art. Over the objection of his elder brother, Chuzo left Japan in 1915 to study abroad, first in Asia and later in Europe. From Paris, Tamotzu eventually made his way to New York in 1920, where he became a vital part of modernist circles. The artist’s remarkable career would be shaped—and obfuscated—through his twin allegiances to the country in which he was raised and that to which he immigrated in his early thirties. With sensitivity and acumen, Tamotzu negotiated the political strife and discrimination that put his Japanese identity into conflict with his determination to forge a reputation as a modern artist in the United States. In New York, Tamotzu found an apartment on the Lower East Side near Greenwich Village and gravitated toward artists who shared his interest in a socially conscious practice, including Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Hideo Benjamin Noda, Philip Evergood, and John Sloan. He joined the Society of Independent Artists and immediately began contributing to its annual exhibitions, where his work would appear virtually every year between 1924 and 1938. He would go on to serve as a board member between 1935 and 1938.1

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figure 72 Chuzo Tamotzu, Still Life with Newspaper, 1931. Oil on canvas, 20 ¼ × 24 ¹/₈ in. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. Gift of Helena L. Katz MD in honor of her aunt and uncle, Louise and Chuzo Tamotzu (2021.35.1). Photo by Luc Demers.

Tamotzu’s style, which he would later describe as “expressionistic realism,” represented a form of social realism, demonstrating both an interest in contemporary urban life and a concern for social justice.2 He chronicled scenes from his Lower East Side neighborhood, frequently depicting overlooked or abandoned areas—such as alleys, roadways, and train tracks—his vantage point frequently that of the voyeur rather than the participant. Looking to his own domicile, the artist actively created still lifes and depictions of cats. Such seemingly traditional genre paintings often revealed the artist’s sly sense of humor, as well as his political leanings. His 1931 Still Life with Newspaper, for example, featured assorted items lying upon the Daily Worker, playfully alluding to his affiliation with the John Reed Club and the American Communist Party, which had published the paper since 1924. Cats on War News (ca. 1940, private collection) showed the animals lapping up milk, news of a bombing campaign serving to wipe their feet. The artist’s pacifist leanings—and his desire to disassociate himself from the aggression of Japan—was even more explicit in his 1933 painting Carving CHUZO TAMOT ZU

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the Map of China (Kaita Epitaph Zanshou Museum, formerly Shinano Drawing Museum, Ueda, Nagano, Japan). If Tamotzu’s work betrayed communist sympathies, by no means did he consider his leftleaning politics incompatible with the promise of American democracy, and throughout the 1930s the artist stressed his strong cultural and political allegiance to his adopted home. This included cofounding An American Group in 1931 to create opportunities for emerging and less well-known artists to gain additional visibility, taking advantage of exhibition space made available at the Barbizon Plaza Hotel. Through the international artistic network of which he was a part, Tamotzu would exhibit widely and be involved in many of the burgeoning institutions taking shape in New York to support the development of American modernism.3 By the 1930s, Tamotzu had earned the respect of his peers and of curators and critics. His work was represented by American Contemporary Art (ACA) Gallery and acquired by museums and prominent collectors, such as Joseph Hirshhorn. Included in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s first biennial in 1932, Tamotzu boasted that when Juliana Force, the museum’s director, sought volunteers to join the Federal Art Project, “I was Number One!”4 His involvement, however, was cut short by a 1937 change in policy that denied positions to noncitizens. This created an unresolvable dilemma, for although the artist had resided in the United States for over a decade and a half, Japanese immigrants were ineligible for naturalization until passage of the Walter-McCarran Act in 1952. Tamotzu’s attempts to address the racist hurdle were unsuccessful: “So then I was the first one, so-called gave the ‘pink slip,’ ” he later lamented.5 Despite falling victim to this discrimination, Tamotzu’s work continued to be understood through an American lens by influential members of the art world. Indeed, Elizabeth McCausland, a sympathetic critic, in praising a 1940 show of Tamotzu’s work at the Vendome Galleries, wryly nodded to the artist’s success in the “free competitive market” in spite of the “economic pressure and hardship” he experienced.6 To this end, Tamotzu’s Summer Relief (1939) would be included in the American section of both the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco and the 1940 New York World’s Fair, as he would stress later in his career. The painting, while characteristic of his work, may also betray the strain of bigotry the Japanese artist was experiencing in a nation that characterized itself as a “melting pot.” Ostensibly depicting youths on the Lower East Side of Manhattan cooling themselves in illegally procured water from a fire hydrant, Summer Relief may refer, tongue in cheek, to Tamotzu’s own gratification in seeing his career moving forward during a time of mounting political heat. The seemingly overwhelming deluge of water, which almost seems on the verge of sweeping away the children who frolic in it, may also suggest the artist’s anxious sensitivity to political forces that could threaten a torrent of destruction once released. Perhaps sensing this implication, McCausland noted that Summer Relief has “extraordinary poetic passages, notably the lower left-hand corner in which a frightened carthorse backs off from water bursting geyserlike through a barrel over a hydrant.”7 Another 1939 painting, Beware of Militarism, testified even more clearly to the artist’s awareness of the precarious political situation in which he found himself, as a Japanese national, in the face 152

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figure 73 Chuzo Tamotzu, Summer Relief, 1939. Oil on canvas mounted on plywood panel, 52 × 39 in. Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art. Gift of Arnold D. Kates, 1965 (1839.23P). Photo by Cameron Gay.

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figure 74 Chuzo Tamotzu, Beware of Militarism, 1939. Sumi brush, watercolor, pen on paper, 12 ⁷/₈ × 14 ½ in. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. Gift of Helena L. Katz MD in honor of her aunt and uncle, Louise and Chuzo Tamotzu (2021.35.2). Photo by Luc Demers.

of ever-louder saber rattling by the country of his birth. The painting was done, as he later told a journalist, not only as a protest against the bellicose policies of the Japanese government, but, even more importantly, “to prove that not all Japanese wanted war.”8 When war did come, Tamotzu immediately proclaimed his allegiance to the United States, joining other members of the “Committee of Japanese Artists Resident in New York City” to sign a public declaration on December 12, 1941, condemning Japanese aggression.9 Tamotzu’s friends in An American Group offered strong support, loudly proclaiming to colleagues and elected officials, including President Franklin D. Roosevelt, their “complete confidence in [the] loyalty to the United States of two of our members, who are Japanese by birth; our president Yasuo Kuniyoshi and our fellow member, Chuzo Tamotzu.”10 154

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Fulfilling his pledge to the United States, Tamotzu volunteered with the Office of Strategic Services, serving both domestically and abroad. Despite this service, shortly after the war he found himself the target of politically motivated persecution due to his involvement with communist organizations prior to the war. In 1948 Tamotzu left New York with his new bride, Louise Kates, the elder sister of Ruth Kates, widow of his close friend Noda. Making their way to Santa Fe, the couple was soon able to take residence in the former home and studio of Tamotzu’s friend John Sloan. Only after her husband’s death did Louise acknowledge the political pressures that had driven them away from the East Coast.11 Tamotzu may have been disappointed to find that in the wake of World War II, Santa Fe no longer represented a bustling center of avant-garde activity, as it had in the 1920s and 1930s. He had traded unwelcome notoriety from his political activities in New York for the relative obscurity of a career outside the art-world capital. But if Tamotzu had lost easy access to the New York art world that had nurtured his ambition and provided the recognition he enjoyed prior to the war, he found acceptance and encouragement in Santa Fe.12 The receptive community actively supported his efforts to build bridges with the country of his birth, most notably through the development, in 1953, of an art exchange between children in Santa Fe and Hiroshima, Japan. The program, realized with the collaboration of Susan B. Anderson, head of art education in the Santa Fe public schools, received national attention.13 Ironically, perhaps, it was in Santa Fe, less than forty miles from the laboratory that had fashioned the nuclear bomb that decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that Tamotzu began to feel more comfortable expressing his Japanese identity. As he noted in a 1964 interview, “A funny thing is this: I never did my Oriental painting after I left Japan, until I came here about five or six years ago.”14 Despite evidence of his disillusionment over the confluence of national and art-world politics that robbed him, in his later years, of the recognition he had earned as a younger artist in New York, Tamotzu continued to work prolifically and with his sense of humor intact. A versatile and prolific artist who combined the aesthetic traditions of multiple cultures, Tamotzu created a distinctive style that revealed both his early Japanese training and his integration of lessons absorbed in the United States. Embracing his own vulnerability and curiosity, Tamotzu provides keen insight into the margins of American society and into the struggle to resist discrimination that targeted his race and creed. Reexamined on its own terms and recontextualized within the American art and culture that helped to stimulate it, the hybrid expression of Chuzo Tamotzu further expands our understanding of American art and the international, social, and political forces that contributed to shaping it. NOTES This essay is dedicated, with profound thanks, to the family of Louise and Chuzo Tamotzu. 1.  Clark S. Marlor, The Society of Independent Artists: The Exhibition Record, 1917–1944 (Park Ridge, NJ: Noyes Press, 1984), 60, 531–532. 2.  The quotation appears in biographical information provided by Chuzo Tamotzu to the New Mexico Museum of Art, May 15, 1950, Chuzo Tamotzu Papers, New Mexico Museum of Art, Archives. The best English-

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language account of Tamotzu’s career remains Chuzo Tamotzu, published privately by Louise Kates Tamotzu, Santa Fe, New Mexico, ca. 1981. Japanese scholarship includes Aiko Izumisawa, Nani mo iranai: Nushu ma iran : arukitsuzuketa gaka Tamotsu Chūzō no sokuseki; Exhibition of Artists Who Moved to the U.S., Nagano-Ken Shinano Museum, October 6–November 4, 1990; and Kumamoto Prefectural Museum of Art, Hideo Benjamin Noda & Chuzo Tamotzu (1992). 3.  In addition to his exhibitions at the Society of Independent Artists, Tamotzu participated in at least sixteen other exhibitions at both museums and commercial galleries between 1931 and 1942. University of New Mexico, Center for Southwestern Research, MSS 609 BC, Box 1, Folder 3. 4.  Sylvia Loomis, “Tape Recorded Interview with Chuzo Tamotzu,” Santa Fe, New Mexico, September 3, 1964, Transcript, 2, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 5.  Ibid., 4. 6.  Elizabeth McCausland, “Chuzo Tamotzu: Vendome Galleries,” Parnassus 12, no. 4 (1940): 40. 7.  Ibid. 8.  “Peace Is Basic Element for Artist Chuzo Tamotzu,” The New Mexican (?), December 7, 1958, Chuzo Tamotzu Papers, New Mexico Museum of Art, Archives. 9.  ShiPu Wang, Becoming American? The Art and Identity Crisis of Yasuo Kuniyoshi (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2011), 19. 10.  Jack Markow, Corresponding Secretary, An American Group, Letter to the membership of An American Group, Dec. 12, 1941; and draft letter from Markow to President Roosevelt, December 19, 1941, Yasuo Kuniyoshi papers, 1906–2016, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Box 3, Folder 1. Wang also makes note of this show of support (Wang, Becoming American?, 19–20). 11.  Bill Hosokawa, “From the Frying Pan: Tamotzu Gallery,” Pacific Citizen, July 29, 1977. 12.  Tamotzu was not the first Japanese artist to be welcomed in Santa Fe; at the time of his arrival, painter Miki Hayakawa was an active member of the artistic community (see ShiPu Wang’s essay on Hayakawa elsewhere in this volume). 13.  “Santa Fe-Jap [sic] Art Exchange Is Outlined,” New Mexican, December 7, 1952 (in Chuzo Tamotzu Papers, “Hiroshima-Santa Fe Children’s Exhibit,” New Mexico Museum of Art, Archives). The project was covered nationally in “Through the Eyes of Children,” Time, May 11, 1953, 78. The project was the subject of the exhibition Perspectives from Postwar Hiroshima: Chuzo Tamotzu, Children’s Drawings, and the Art of Resolution, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, January 10–April 16, 2017, https://www.bowdoin.edu/art-museum /exhibitions/2017/drawings-for-hiroshima.html. 14.  Loomis, “Tape Recorded Interview with Chuzo Tamotzu,” 5.

FOR FURTHER READING Hemingway, Andrew. Artists on the Left: American Artists and the Communist Movement 1926–1956. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019. Wang, ShiPu. Becoming American? The Art and Identity Crisis of Yasuo Kuniyoshi. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2011. . The Other American Moderns: Matsura, Ishigaki, Noda, Hayakawa. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2017.

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MICHAEL LOBEL

ROBERT NEAL b. 1916, Atlanta, Georgia d. 1987, Dayton, Ohio

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O MOST OF US, THE STORY IS A FAMILIAR ONE .

It might take place in any number of locations: a museum, most certainly, or a religious site (a shrine, a cathedral), or even a room in a home. Wherever the scene is set, an individual comes upon a work of art, often unexpectedly. The resulting encounter prompts such an intense response that the viewer can’t get the object out of her mind. It occupies her thoughts; it returns at unexpected moments. One could envision this as a variant of the phenomenon known as the Stendhal syndrome, in which an individual experiences an intense psychological or physical response to a work of art, from a quickened heartbeat, dizziness, and fainting to panic attacks and bouts of madness. In one notable such case, in 2018 a tourist reportedly suffered a heart attack after gazing at Botticelli’s Birth of Venus in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery. I had such a response—fortunately not a cardiac episode or hallucinations, mind you, but certainly a strong reaction—when I came upon a painting by Robert Neal, The Petrified Forest (1962), on display in New York in about 2018. The picture is simultaneously bewitching and confounding: a vaguely humanoid figure lies supine, propped up on one arm. From the work’s title, one gathers that the figure’s body is made up of segments of petrified wood, but it’s hard to imagine we would easily 157

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figure 75 Robert Neal, The Petrified Forest, 1962. Oil on cotton canvas, 28 × 42 ½ in. Private collection. Courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries.

make the identification without that added information. The fingers of its left hand extend into the ground, like roots or feelers burrowing into the earth for sustenance or anchorage. Where one would expect to find a head, we get a strangely compacted arrangement of forms that coalesce into the rough approximation of a visage, but with seemingly no neck in sight. On its own the figure might not add up to much, an unremarkable product of some variant strain of surrealism or magic realism, if not for the proliferation of still more elements throughout the picture, some seemingly at odds with others. There are the scattered implements, including a paintbrush and paint can—more readily recognizable references, perhaps, to the artist’s tools. And there is the fragmentary brick construction above, which looks to be either balanced precariously atop the figure’s head or protruding awkwardly from a mass of greenery. The setting appears to shift continually, from the forested clearing in the foreground to the furrowed field behind it and, further back, a factory with two active smokestacks nestled in a hilly range. And then, finally, there is the bird perched on the figure’s knee, rendered as a dark, flat silhouette, its beak open as if in mid-utterance. Is there a preternatural conversation going on here, in a language avian, animal, or creatural, one we are unable to comprehend? My fascination with this curious scene has, in the intervening years, prompted me to find out more about its creator. And, unfortunately, what I take to be the general inscrutability of 158

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this particular picture extends, to some extent, to the details of Neal’s own career. Early on, he garnered no small amount of attention. In his youth he studied with the influential African American artist Hale Woodruff, and he worked closely with Woodruff—in fact, from all available accounts, was a primary collaborator—on the latter’s Amistad murals for Talladega College. While he was in his twenties, Neal exhibited in notable venues. In 1939 his work was included in a major exhibition, Contemporary Negro Art, curated by Alain Locke at the Baltimore Museum of Art. There he was shown alongside such luminaries as Aaron Douglas, Lois Mailou Jones, Jacob Lawrence, Norman Lewis, and Woodruff. The following year, three paintings by him appeared at the American Negro Exposition in Chicago. By the late 1940s he had relocated to Dayton, Ohio, where he continued to make and exhibit work. But Neal also encountered no small degree of difficulty, including reported struggles with alcoholism and the cancer that led to his death at age seventy-one. Neal’s output ranged widely, from portraits to still lifes to landscapes. His figural works depict fully realized Black subjects, from an infantryman clad in combat fatigues, to a tradesman, to a woman grieving over a letter with news of a loved one, perhaps a husband or son, lost to the Vietnam War. In an unpublished interview, Neal stated that “all of my work deals with Black studies or Black personalities, Black scenery. I don’t know whether this is good or bad, but it is very, very seldom that I deal with anything that is White. It is perhaps from my heritage.” One wonders if this sort of unrepentant assertion of the centrality of his racial identity to his art might be one factor in the relative lack of attention to his work. I want to know still more about Neal, and to have the opportunity to view more of his paintings, many of which have proven difficult to locate. Are his portraits of performer Paul Robeson and singer Marian Anderson still extant? What was it about his early landscape, Three Trees, that prompted no less a figure than Locke to include it in a major museum display? And why did Neal identify a still life entitled My Thing as his “most beloved” painting? Its grouping of objects is said to have included a vase of flowers, a painter’s palette, a fresh gourd, a box of matches, and—somewhat jarringly—a pistol in its sheath, the composition painted in “richly toned autumn colors—golds, reds, browns and oranges.”1 Perhaps these works would provide additional context for understanding some of the more enigmatic aspects of The Petrified Forest. Although many of us, when we see the word artist, tend to think of someone whose entire professional life is devoted to an artistic pursuit, only a tiny percentage of artists are able to support themselves through making their own art. Neal, who was not among that privileged few, worked for years at such Dayton-area firms as the Master Electric Company and the Monsanto Chemical Company. Perhaps his work experience helped inform the assortment of tools on view in The Petrified Forest, including the brush and paint can, the latter identified with painting not as a fine art practice but rather as a form of workaday labor. This puts a finer point on an otherwise seemingly innocuous aspect of Neal’s aforementioned portrait of a soldier: when the work was accessioned by the Columbus Museum in Columbus, Georgia, the conservator who examined the canvas reported that it was stretched on a unique ROBERT NEAL

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figure 76 Robert Neal, Rearguard, 1950. Oil on canvas, 27 ⁵/₈ × 23 ¾ in. The Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia. The Ella E. Kirven Charitable Lead Trust for Acquisitions, G.2018.17.

strainer built from four wooden rulers nailed together.2 The make-do attitude evident here points to someone committed to seeing his work realized, using whatever means were at his disposal. If an artist shows that much of a commitment to their craft, then as scholars and curators we are compelled to approach the task of recovering their creative vision with at least a modicum of the same intensity, devotion, and care. 160

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NOTES 1.  Leslie Benson, “A Painter for the People,” Impact Weekly (Dayton, Ohio), August 16–22, 2001, 10. 2.  Megan Shores, “Portrait of War,” Art Conservator 13, no. 2 (2018): 11.

FOR FURTHER READING “Atlanta Youth’s Art Work Gets High Rating.” Atlanta Daily World, April 23, 1936, 1–2. Benson, Leslie. “A Painter for the People.” Impact Weekly (Dayton, Ohio), August 16–22, 2001, 8–10. Locke, Alain, ed. The Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and of the Negro Theme in Art. Washington, DC: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1940. p. 111. Shores, Megan. “Portrait of War.” Art Conservator 13, no. 2 (2018): 11.

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ALONA C. WILSON

HUGHIE LEE-SMITH b. 1915, Eustis, Florida d. 1999, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Hidden from View: The Art of Hughie Lee-Smith

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artist whose skills have been measured in part by his cultural and racial experiences in this country. A study of his career would be severely limited without the racial, cultural, and political context of his time. In 1998, art historian Samella Lewis wrote about the relationship between art and culture: “Art marks a way of life,” and “its signs and symbols are so integrated with everyday life, patterns, and beliefs that it is difficult, if not next to impossible, to separate art from life itself.”1 Lee-Smith’s was an honorable career, shaped by many factors—his time, place, education, intellect, and personal experiences. Yet today the work of Lee-Smith is scarcely known, and we are challenged to place him in art history. Examining Lee-Smith’s career by looking forward and back from his midlife in the 1960s reveals how changing aesthetics and racial discord in America contribute to the limited visibility of this accomplished artist and to the loss in art history of African American cultural experience. Between 1958 and 1962, Lee-Smith moved from Detroit to New York City. He had spent his childhood in Atlanta, Georgia, home of his maternal grandparents, before joining his mother in Cleveland, Ohio.2 He arrived in New York with an art degree from the Cleveland School of UGHIE LEE-SMITH WAS AN AFRICAN AMERICAN

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figure 77 Hughie Lee-Smith, Boy with Tire, 1952. Oil on pressed wood panel, 23 ¾ × 32 ½ in. Detroit Institute of Arts. Gift of Dr. S. B. Milton, Dr. James A. Owen, Dr. B. F. Seabrooks, and Dr. A. E. Thomas Jr., 53.59. Photo © Detroit Institute of Arts/ Bridgeman Images. © 2021 Estate of Hughie Lee-Smith; licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Art, additional art studies with the Detroit Art School of the Society of Arts and Crafts, and a bachelor’s degree from Wayne State University. He carried a successful record of exhibitions, private commissions, and awards from Cleveland, Chicago, and Detroit, cities where he had also established relationships with museums, galleries, and collectors. In New York, Kraushaar Gallery, Petit Gallery, and Janet Nessler Gallery represented him. He exhibited with his contemporaries, often not African Americans, in national and local shows. In 1957 he won the Emily Lowe Award, sponsored by the Joe and Emily Lowe Foundation; and in 1959 he received the National Academy of Design’s Thomas B. Clarke award. Lee-Smith created realistic figurative paintings to express the human condition. His paintings are recognizable for repetitive motifs of familiar objects and limited human presence. The motifs of brightly colored balloons or ribbons began appearing in his 1950s work, acting as emotive symbols to impart meaning. For example, Man with Balloons (1960) reflects his mature style. He employs balloons, shadows, and a fissured wall; two men walk forward, in a stage-like set, creating a scene to be unraveled, with motifs evoking human emotions such as anxiety, hope, or joy. His imagery connects to European surrealism, American realism, and later magic or metaphysical realism. Sources as diverse as Edward Hopper, HUGHIE LEE-SMITH

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figure 78 Hughie Lee-Smith, Man with Balloons, 1960. Oil on linen canvas, 36 × 46 in. Current location unknown. Courtesy of Swann Auction Galleries. © 2021 Estate of Hughie Lee-Smith; licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Giorgio de Chirico, George Tooker, Eugene Berman, and popular culture influenced his work. Upon arrival in New York in 1959, Lee-Smith worked toward membership in the National Academy of Design. In 1965, he achieved the status of a National Associate; however, he sought an even greater honor, and in 1967 he earned the coveted medal and title of National Academician, the highest honor for an American artist. In 1924, Henry Ossawa Tanner had been the first African American to be honored as a National Academician, and in the 150year history of the prestigious artist-based institution, Lee-Smith became only the second African American to be so designated. Much is expected of an artist with the title of National Academician—including a gift to the National Academy. In 1968, Lee-Smith donated a new painting, The Bridge, which joined his earlier Self-Portrait (1964) in the National Academy’s collection. A luminous landscape, The Bridge evokes both mystery and quiet. Tall grasses sway, as if driven by a gentle breeze,

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figure 79 Hughie Lee-Smith, The Bridge, before 1968. Oil on canvas, 25 ⁷/₈ × 36 in. National Academy of Design, New York. Photo © National Academy of Design, New York/Bridgeman Images. © 2021 Estate of Hughie Lee-Smith; licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

and partially obstruct access to a decaying bridge. The painting lulls the viewer into tranquil meditation with nature. There is no evidence of the complex political or social unrest of the 1960s. In February 1968, Ebony magazine published an extensive review of The Evolution of African American Art 1800–1950, an exhibition of 150 paintings by African American artists. LeeSmith was included in the show, and his Boy on the Rooftop (1968, location unknown) graced the cover, along with paintings by African American artists Charles Alston, Romare Bearden, William H. Johnson, Merton D. Simpson, and Edward M. Bannister. Bearden and Carroll Greene Jr. organized the show, which opened in 1967 at City University of New York. Curator Greene interviewed Lee-Smith, along with other exhibitors, for the Archives of American Art, further enriching the history of Black artists in the United States.3 Defining a new cultural aesthetic was vital to African American artists of the modern civil rights and Black Power era of the 1960s. The overt political agenda expressed by the Black

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Arts Movement often left mature African American artists like Lee-Smith invisible and irrelevant in contemporary exhibitions of younger artists. When Lee-Smith’s figurative style and realistic subject matter were eclipsed by contemporary developments, he returned to teaching, which had provided vital support. Beginning in 1938, he had taught and chaired the art department at Claflin University, a historically Black college in Orangeburg, South Carolina. After his U.S. Navy service during World War II, he held numerous temporary teaching positions in Michigan, Illinois, and New Jersey. In 1969 he accepted a prestigious two-year Artist-in-Residence position at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and subsequently an adjunct professorship at Trenton State College. In 1972 he joined, by invitation, the faculty at the Art Students League in New York City, and he continued to develop new artworks. Several landmark exhibitions of African American art appeared in the late 1970s and 1980s. Art historian David Driskell curated the exhibition Two Centuries of Black American Art and authored the accompanying catalogue that narrated a history of African American art and the participating artists.4 Lee-Smith’s art was included, as it was in many subsequent exhibitions that exposed growing audiences to the work of mature African American artists. After retiring from the Art Students League in 1988, he painted continuously and his art gained new prominence. Public awareness of African American art and artists had grown along with the economic expansion of the Black middle class. Lee-Smith was a mature, academic painter whose works often transcended references to race. He clearly viewed his race as a “condition” of his life, unchanging and ever present, a subject he rarely dwelled upon. In a panel discussion in 1985 about race and economics at the Art Institute of Chicago, he stated unequivocally that “the Afro-American artist, by and large, has not reached the promised land of equal opportunity with his white colleagues in the main stream.”5 By the 1990s, several museum collections included Lee-Smith’s work and commercial art galleries provided visible support with exhibitions. The galleries included those owned by African Americans, particularly the Isobel Neal Gallery in Chicago, the June Kelly Gallery in New York, and the Stella Jones Gallery in New Orleans. He also received two significant formal portrait commissions of Black Americans. His posthumous portrait of Reginald F. Lewis (1996, Harvard Club of New York City) is that of a well-dressed, successful businessman standing assured and looking outward. In David N. Dinkins (1995, Public Design Commission of the City of New York), the former mayor of New York sat for the painting and is posed seated with a sea-green background that complements his attentive eyes. Both portraits demonstrate the mastery of expression and anatomy of a skillful portrait painter. Lee-Smith was featured in three retrospective exhibitions prior to his death, the first in 1988 and two others in 1995 and 1997. His determination had armored him against societal limitations of race, but it could not erase the confines of systemic racism. He painted complex, perplexing concerns about humanity using symbols he refused to define. And yet, he painted the human figure and the natural world in a recognizable form throughout his career. When we expand our criteria to include the experiences of America’s many cultures, the discipline of art history is enriched and extended. 166

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NOTES 1.  Samella Lewis, “Foreword,” in Halima Taha, Collecting African American Art: Works on Paper and Canvas (New York: Crown, 1998), xiii. 2.  See Aiden Faust, “Chronology of Hughie Lee-Smith,” in Leslie King-Hammond, Hughie Lee-Smith (San Francisco: Pomegranate Communications, 2010), 94–110. 3.  Hughie Lee-Smith, interview by Carroll Greene Jr., transcript, 1968; Oral History Project, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 4.  David C. Driskell, Two Centuries of Black American Art (New York: Knopf, 1976). 5.  Interview of Hughie Lee-Smith by Bethuel Hunter, June 14, 1995; Hughie Lee-Smith papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

FOR FURTHER READING Childs, Adrienne L. “Activism and Shaping of Black Identities (1964–1988).” In David Bindman and Henry Louis Gates Jr., eds., The Image of the Black in Western Art, vol. 5: The Twentieth Century, part 2: The Rise of the Black Artists. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014. Driskell, David C. Two Centuries of Black American Art. New York: Knopf, 1976. King-Hammond, Leslie. Hughie Lee-Smith. Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 2010. Marion, Sara L. Stages of Influence: The Universal Theater of Hughie Lee-Smith. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Art Museum, 2001. Sims, Lowery Stokes. “Hughie Lee-Smith: Romantic Realist or Poetic Alchemist?” In Hughie Lee-Smith: Retrospective Exhibition. Trenton: New Jersey State Museum, 1988. Wilson, Alona C. “Beyond the Surface: Hughie Lee-Smith.” In Jeremiah McCarthy and Diana Thompson, For America: Paintings from the National Academy of Design. New York: American Federation of Arts, 2019.

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AUSTIN PORTER

CHARLES HENRY ALSTON b. 1907, Charlotte, North Carolina d. 1977, New York, New York

Charles Alston: Style in the Historical Record

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though problematic element of art historical analysis. An invaluable consideration when organizing an oeuvre, style can also obscure historical nuance. For example, the common practice of categorizing an artist’s style into “early” and “late” periods can fail to account for creative experiments. Similarly, the scholarly tendency to associate modern artists with a singular, personal style often limits the ways in which an artist’s work is exhibited, sold, and remembered more broadly. Thus, we might consider the legacy of an artist whose practice was characterized by stylistic variety rather than predictability. Charles Alston’s successful yet largely overlooked career provides a rich example. An African American artist and educator who established himself in Harlem during the 1930s, Alston built a commercial art career before prioritizing his fine art interests in the early 1950s. Although consistently drawn to subject matter that addressed the representation of race, Alston’s style often fluctuated between naturalism and abstraction. Categorizing this diverse artistic output has presented a challenge to scholars, who have subsequently limited his presence in the canon. The following remarks briefly consider how Alston’s resistance to developing a consistently recognizable, marketable style has contribTYLE IS A CRUCIAL

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uted to his continued marginalization. My comments prioritize the artist’s practice between 1949 and 1955, when his ability to paint in multiple styles led to notable recognition. During these seven years, Alston completed a well-received public mural, staged his first solo gallery exhibition, renounced his commercial art career, and saw his work enter the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Despite his success at mid-century, Alston’s painting reached a limited audience. Moreover, his work has yet to receive a major retrospective exhibition similar to those granted posthumously to a handful of his contemporaries.1 To be clear, this essay’s emphasis on style does not intend to discount how racism limits the success of artists of color. Indeed, Alston was an astute observer of art-world politics who—on at least one occasion—refused to participate in a racially segregated exhibition by arguing that such practices contributed to the marginalization of Black artists. However, by emphasizing Alston’s stylistic range, I hope to draw attention to how style can contribute to an artist’s historical reputation. As with many young American artists in the 1930s, Alston’s early paintings addressed social concerns through an expressive, naturalistic style before turning increasingly abstract. Though abstract forms began to prevail in Alston’s paintings by the early 1940s, his previous aesthetic interests reappeared in 1949 with a mural titled The History of the Negro in California—Exploration and Colonization. This work depicts identifiable Black individuals— including scouts, clergy, and entrepreneurs—who contributed to the history of western North America between the sixteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Filled with expressive figures in dynamic poses, the composition suggests a democratic quality by refusing to prioritize a specific historical moment. Exploration and Colonization received a warm reception from Alston’s patron, the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Company of Los Angeles, which at the time was the largest Black-owned company west of the Mississippi River. Installed prominently in the lobby of Golden State’s headquarters, Alston’s work was paired with a mural by his colleague Hale Woodruff, titled Settlement and Development, that addressed historical themes between the Civil War and the early twentieth century. These simultaneously commissioned works recognized African American lives as an integral component of the history of the western United States while also contributing to Golden State’s growing collection of work by Black artists. The naturalism used in Alston’s mural contrasted strongly with the abstract styles that dominated his contemporaneous work. His stylistic range is made clear by comparing Exploration and Colonization to a work completed the following year. Titled simply Painting, this oil on canvas features a series of colorful, nearly cubist shapes arranged before a dark background. While Alston’s previous abstract works included figurative forms that demonstrated an affinity with sources ranging from African art and classical mythology to European modernism, Painting removed all obvious references to naturalism. In so doing, Alston demonstrated an awareness of recent experiments in abstraction generated by his fellow New Yorkers. Painting also signified an important milestone in Alston’s career beyond its aesthetic form. In 1950 the Metropolitan Museum installed Painting at American Painting Today, a major exhibition of more than three hundred canvases created by artists from across the CHARLES HENRY ALSTON

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American Museum.

Charles Henry Alston, installation image of The Negro in California History—Exploration and Colonization, ca. 1949. Oil on canvas, 16 ft. 5 in. × 9 ft. 3 in. Courtesy of the California African

figure 80

figure 81 Charles Henry Alston, Painting, 1950. Oil on canvas, 50 × 36 in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Arthur Hoppock Hearn Fund, 1951, 51.18. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, New York.

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figure 82 Charles Henry Alston, The Family, 1955. Oil on canvas, 48 ³/₁₆ × 35 ¹³/₁₆ in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Purchased with funds from the Artists and Students Assistance Fund, 55.47. Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art; licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

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country. This exhibit coincided with Alston’s decision to discontinue a highly successful commercial art practice in order to devote himself more fully to his fine art career. This risky venture was validated the following year when the Metropolitan acquired Painting for its permanent collection. Alston’s subsequent paintings more frequently combine abstract forms with representational elements, as seen in works such as The Family. While referencing traditional portraiture in both its title and subject, The Family upset conventional modes of familial representation by overlapping stylized anatomical forms with surrounding elements. Alston furthered the scene’s stylistic range by using a palette knife to render figurative details, furniture, and floorboards. The resulting synthesis of styles in The Family share visual and thematic similarities with a number of works Alston later produced in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to paintings of African American families and jazz musicians, Alston used a comparable approach in scenes of marching figures that evoke civil rights–era demonstrations. Alston’s interest in continuously revising his style received mixed reviews from contemporary critics. He recalled that Emily Genauer viewed his work favorably by noting that he “refused to be pigeonholed.”2 Similarly, when discussing one of Alston’s last solo exhibitions, the journalist Harry Henderson explained that the installation “was like a show by five or six artists. . . . Each of these different styles demonstrated Alston’s virtuosity. Yet there was no one identifiable style enabling instant recognition.”3 Positive evaluations for stylistic range ran counter to prevailing critical views, expressed most forcefully by Clement Greenberg, who encouraged artists to develop and maintain a consistent style. The critic Robert Coates applied a similar standard by noting that Alston was not “really ready for a show yet—his work’s still too changeable, unsettled.”4 Nevertheless, Alston continued to practice a range of styles unapologetically. He once noted: “Depending upon how I feel, I work either figuratively or abstractly. . . . I’ve never held with the ‘consistency’ the critics are so hipped on. After I’ve solved a problem, I can’t get interested in repeating it.”5 Scholars have largely de-emphasized Alston’s artistic work in favor of his accomplishments as a teacher and organizer. To be clear, many art historians are undoubtedly familiar with Alston, and his name is indexed in exhibition catalogues and scholarly monographs. However, these references typically note Alston’s mentorship of Jacob Lawrence—his most well-known student—or his influential appointments to New Deal art education programs. Similarly, scholarly sources regularly note Alston’s contribution to the establishment of two New York City–based artist groups, 306 (1934–37) and Spiral (1963–66), both of which emphasized racial consciousness and social justice. Aside from a few crucial texts, the historical record has unfortunately prioritized these pursuits over Alston’s own career as an artist, which defies simplistic categorization. NOTES 1.  Several African American artists from Alston’s generation have received major posthumous museum exhibitions and scholarly catalogues. See exhibitions and related publications devoted to Romare Bearden (2003), Norman Lewis (2015), Charles White (2018), and Hale Woodruff (2012).

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2.  Oral history interview with Charles Henry Alston, October 19, 1968. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 3.  Harry Henderson, “Remembering Charles Alston,” Charles Alston: Artist and Teacher (New York: Kenkeleba Gallery, 1990), 8. 4.  Robert Coates to John Woodburn, February 5, 1950, Box 1, Folder 6, Charles Henry Alston Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 5.  Grace Glueck, “ ‘The Best Painter I Can Possibly Be,’ ” New York Times, December 8, 1968.

FOR FURTHER READING Charles Henry Alston Papers, 1924–1980. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Charles Henry Alston Papers no. 4931. Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Bearden, Romare, and Harry Henderson. A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present. New York: Pantheon, 1993. Linden, Diana, and Larry Greene. “Charles Alston’s Harlem Hospital Murals: Cultural Politics in Depression Era Harlem.” Prospects 26 (October 2001): 391–421. Wardlaw, Alvia J. Charles Alston. San Francisco: Pomegranate, 2007.

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KRISTINA WILSON

PAUL F. KEENE JR. b. 1920, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania d. 2009, Warrington, Pennsylvania

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as a much-revered teacher in Philadelphia and Bucks County, Pennsylvania, from the 1950s through the 1990s has somewhat obscured the legacy of his art. Over the decades of his career as a painter and printmaker, he explored the experience of being Black in the United States in works that defy easy categorization: he himself called them “figurative abstractions.”1 Keene traveled to Paris and Haiti in the 1950s, formative years when he developed his sophisticated understanding of cubism, painterly abstraction, and the expressive power of a bold, saturated color palette. His years living abroad gave him an expanded view of the cultural expressions of the African diaspora, and he represents a generation of American artists who sought to forge a Black artistic identity in the decade after World War II, just before the blossoming of the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s. In 1955, Art in America noted in his work “an insistence, a nervous tension” that nonetheless resulted in compositions of “closely knit harmony.”2 Keene was born in Philadelphia into a middle-class family. Both of his parents worked as morticians, and Keene recalls in interviews a childhood home where African American history, jazz, and art were celebrated; his father followed closely the jazz scene in Philadelphia, and AUL F. KEENE’S STATURE

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the family subscribed to Carter Woodson’s Journal of Negro History. Like other Philadelphia artists of his generation (such as Barbara Chase-Riboud and Dox Thrash), one of Keene’s foundational childhood experiences was attending the free weekend art classes at the Fleisher Memorial. He enrolled at the Philadelphia Museum School of Art in 1939, partly because of its strong program in illustration. While there, ironically, he discovered his lifelong love of painting, but his early interest in illustration is key to his artistic project. His ability to render a face with all of the distinctiveness of a portrait, even when it is completely fictional, is a product of his sharp observational eye and ability to intuit that the angle of a cheekbone can tell countless stories. Such details recur in his paintings throughout the decades, conveyed on canvas or paper with a few decisive, economical brushstrokes. From the 1980s onward, he often framed these faces within squares or circles so that they evoke yearbook photographs or walls of family portraits. His clusters of faces, each suggesting a narrative far too complex to contain within a single frame, exist in dynamic spatial tension with larger fields of abstraction. After serving in World War II and completing his degree at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Keene and his wife, Laura, moved to Paris in 1949 with funding from the GI Bill so that he could enroll at the Académie Julian. He became a founding artist-member of Galerie Huit, a gallery funded by Robert Rosenwald and run largely as a cooperative enterprise, dedicated to showing art by Americans in Paris. In his oral history at the Archives of American Art, Keene described the importance of his two years in Paris. While there, he learned about cubism and abstraction and developed a sophisticated approach to the picture plane—constantly challenging the viewer’s perception of pictorial depth and flatness—that would engage him for the rest of his career. More significantly, it was a place of professional, social, and personal freedom outside of the racist restrictions of the United States: “I think [Paris] was great because it was really the first time I felt like a free man,” he recalled.3 In Paris, Keene decided that he would like to travel to Nigeria to study its indigenous art, and applied for an Opportunity Fellowship from the John Hay Whitney Foundation. Although his first application was unsuccessful, he applied again after returning to the United States and received the award—by that time, however, travel restrictions prevented him from going to Nigeria. In August 1952, he and Laura moved to Haiti. For Keene, Haiti “was the nearest place that I could go that the African traditions were whole—they hadn’t been altered, and the music and all was the same as in Nigeria.”4 He taught painting for two years at the Centre d’Art in Port-au-Prince, where his fellowship was renewed with the enthusiastic support of DeWitt Peters, the center’s director. For Keene, the most significant part of his time in Haiti was his broader immersion in the culture, both its music and its religion. He was “absolutely fascinated by the music . . . the percussion instruments, drumming and whatnot,” as he recalled in his oral history, but his interest in Haiti’s mystical traditions had a deeper, lasting impact on his art.5 Upon his return to the United States, he wrote about Haitian art for the Philadelphia chapter of the Artists Equity Association, celebrating an artistic tradition that was tightly intertwined with mystical experience: “The active presence 176

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figure 83 Paul F. Keene Jr., Clarinet Player, 1955. Oil on Masonite, 41 ½ × 24 ½ in. Collection of the African American Museum in Philadelphia. Courtesy of the family of Paul Keene and Dolan/Maxwell.

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figure 84 Paul F. Keene Jr., Street Quartet, 1990. Acrylic on canvas, 54 × 52 ¼ in. Collection of the James A. Michener Art Museum. Museum purchase funded by Anne and Joseph Gardocki. Courtesy of the family of Paul Keene and Dolan/Maxwell.

of supernatural forces and powers is an accepted fundamental and religious concept. . . . This power serves as a liaison between the supernatural and natural worlds while permeating all thought and matter the artist concerns himself with.”6 Over the many decades of Keene’s career, he anchored his exploration of Black experience around the formative nodes of his training in the 1940s and 1950s: the fusion of music and religion, the traversing of figuration and abstraction, the simultaneous pursuit of both narrative and a suspended state of heightened emotion. In a relatively early painting, Clarinet Player (1955), Keene is clearly enjoying his exploration of pattern and abstraction: the 178

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figure 85 Paul F. Keene Jr., Generations, 1996. Color offset lithograph printed on two sheets, joined, 43 ¹/₈ × 29 ⁷/₈ in. Philadelphia Museum of Art. Gift of the Brandywine Workshop, Philadelphia, in memory of Anne d’Harnoncourt, 2009, 2009-61-48a, b. Courtesy of the family of Paul Keene and Dolan/Maxwell.

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player’s shirt and trousers are forged of two contrasting patterns, and he stands in front of a panel of abstraction, framed within a wall of yet more abstraction; his sheet music falls off a table whose top is itself a product of abstract mark making. The dense layering of color and gesture might be an analogue for the improvisation spilling out of his clarinet. Street Quartet (1990) infuses jazz performance with religiosity, as each of the four quartet members below appear like saints on an altarpiece predella. Keene has rendered their faces with his typical illustrator’s distinctiveness—we feel as though we can hear each man’s voice as we visually trace wrinkles on a forehead, the curve of a nose—and yet they are all cast against backgrounds of utter abstraction containing letters, numbers, geometric shapes. The man on the far right and the man on the far left both seem to be glowing, basking perhaps in the light cast by the radiant halo that hovers in the abstract window of red above. Keene’s hot colors elicit emotion, and his faces suggest a story, as the entire painting oscillates between windows of experience we can access and those we cannot. Keene completed several residencies, later in his career, at the Brandywine Workshop, where he expanded his work into printmaking. In Generations (1996), from his “Urban Walls” series, he creates an abstract field out of marks that look like graffiti. Several portrait heads are juxtaposed, like advertisements for hip-hop concerts pasted to this urban wall, but slowly—in the upper right—they begin to dissolve into the field of wild color. The “generations” Keene refers to might be his own, as the series refers to the streets and walls of his family neighborhood in Philadelphia, which suffered from homelessness, joblessness, and addiction in the late twentieth century. The work is at once an expression of abstract beauty and a “final notice” against cycles of segregation, ghettoization, and poverty. As a member of the generation of artists who came of age after the waning of the Harlem Renaissance, Keene balanced a fierce ambition to explore abstraction and the outer limits of color expressionism with a desire to express the experience of Black America. He used music and religion, filtered through his encounters with the Afro-diaspora in Haiti, to explore community, racial pride, and pain. His art demonstrates the complex ways that painters adapted abstraction in the twentieth century for purposes far beyond the typical understanding of abstraction as content-free or apolitical. In Keene’s hands, abstraction is a ground for community, a site for the gathering of diverse narratives, and a window through which we look at ourselves. NOTES 1.  Oral history interview with Paul Keene, April 23, 1990, transcript, p. 136, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter “Oral history, AAA, 1990”). 2.  “Paul Keene,” Art in America, February 1955, p. 34, Paul F. Keene papers, ca. 1940–1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 3.  Oral history, AAA, 1990, 81. 4.  Ibid., 96. 5.  Ibid., 102–104. 6.  Paul F. Keene Jr., “Haitian Painters,” AEA: Artists Equity Association Newsletter: Philadelphia Chapter 2, no. 1 (1954): 1. Paul F. Keene papers, ca. 1940–1987, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

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FOR FURTHER READING Holton, Curlee Raven. Paul Keene: His Art and His Legacy. Exhibition catalogue. Doylestown, PA: James A. Michener Art Museum, 2005. Moore, Lewis Tanner. “Paul Keene: An Appreciation.” International Review of African American Art 16, no. 1 (1999): 45–51.

PAUL F. KEENE JR.

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RUTH FINE

LARRY DAY b. 1921, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania d. 1998, Abington Township, Pennsylvania

Larry Day and the Reach for Totality

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in the massive library assembled by painter Larry Day contained a bookmark reproducing a work of art—mainly paintings, drawings, and prints, but occasionally tapestries, sculpture, and architecture. Day snipped these images from printed ephemera such as magazines, museum bulletins, exhibition announcements, and outdated calendars. He kept files of the clippings at the ready, potential motifs to be visually collaged into his drawings and paintings.1 In respect to their use as bookmarks, the images were carefully selected for associations Day saw between the work of art and the text. Because he seldom considered his reading finished, the bookmarks were never removed. Philosophy, literature (poetry, drama, fiction, nonfiction), history, art, music—in other words, the broad reach of the humanities and their theoretical underpinnings—were Day’s visual and intellectual preoccupations. Similarly, Day would listen to music he associated with texts he was reading and paintings on which he was working; his range moved from early classical music to jazz to the present, primarily of European and U.S. origin. He listened carefully, sometimes conducting with a proper score and baton. He very much lived in his head, transforming thought into action by making works of art. IRTUALLY EVERY BOOK

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Day came from a blue-collar background, and his high school studies focused on the commercial realm, as college was unaffordable. However, he later recalled reading, as a teenager, Amy Lowell’s two-volume biography of John Keats, which initiated his desire to be an artist (becoming a poet was his initial intention). After high school, he served in the Pacific during World War II and participated in the invasion of Iwo Jima. When he returned to Philadelphia after the war, the GI Bill transformed his life, enabling him to study painting (his second art interest) at Temple University’s Tyler School of Art, from which he earned both a BFA and a BS in education (with honors) in 1950. A 1948 Matisse exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art had presented the French artist’s direct, painterly methods as a radical contrast to the academic traditions of underpainting and layered glazes that Day was learning at Tyler. He immediately assimilated this modernist approach into his art. Day spent 1952–53 in Europe, primarily Paris, drawing and visiting museums. Shortly after his return, he was again bowled over by an exhibition, this time of drawings by Willem de Kooning, clinching a temporary move to abstraction. By 1962, however, having produced a significant body of work in the abstract expressionist mode (derived from figural forms and the structures of landscape), Day concluded that he was repeating himself, that one gesture led immediately to a predetermined other. The realization caused him to shift back to representation, ultimately leading to his inclusion in such memorable exhibitions as Linda Nochlin’s Realism Now in 1968 and Scott Burton’s The Realist Revival four years later. Day’s approach was rooted in what he understood to be universal concerns of painters throughout history, addressing as well the contemporary issues presented by de Kooning, Philip Guston, and others, which he believed essential to advancing the art of his time. By the age of forty he was committed to this broad embrace of painterly ideas, which he explored for the rest of his life. After Steen (1962) was Day’s transformational painting. While refining this work he discovered that a mark could be both a gesture and a fold, a painterly element that likewise referenced an element in the world. The tension between these two situations, what Day referred to as “this and that,” became profoundly important to him. This is evident in his extensive writings about art—essays and notes that address painting’s essential meaning to this artist’s understanding of experience. Day’s “ironic realism”—as his art was dubbed by the National Gallery of Art curator Nan Rosenthal—can be divided into two primary motifs: complex figure compositions and paintings of place that are devoid of human presence. The figural works are based on multiple sources, often photographs Day would take of his friends, having asked them to strike a particular pose when they visited the studio or wherever they happened to be. A devotee of Life, Vogue, and other fashion magazines, he retained in his files dozens of clippings cut from them, images primarily of women that he might appropriate for his paintings and drawings as needed. He also used art-based subjects like those he embraced as bookmarks, particularly from Poussin but including works by an immense range of artists. The site paintings, by contrast, are generally based on a single source, most frequently photographs the LARRY DAY

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figure 86 Larry Day, After Steen, 1962. Oil on canvas, 58 ½ × 48 in. Collection of Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia. Gift of Ruth Fine in honor of William R. Valerio, 2020. Photo by Matthew Dodd. © Estate of Larry Day.

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figure 87 Larry Day, Changes, 1982. Oil on canvas, 54 × 66 in. Collection of Joseph and Pamela Yohlin. Promised gift to Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia. Photo by Jack Ramsdale. © Estate of Larry Day.

artist shot himself, or that were sent to him by family and friends when they discovered “Day-like” places. Less frequently, his sites would be based on newspaper and magazine documentation. Drawing was a constant of Day’s practice, swiftly accomplished in notebooks and on small sheets of paper, as well as the highly finished drawings for which he is known. He drew images of places, both landscapes and cityscapes, though these rarely related to specific site paintings. By contrast, there frequently was a relationship between figurative works on paper and compositions that were underway on canvas, or beginning to be imagined. Often known in multiple drawings (in graphite, pen and ink and wash, or watercolor, sometimes in combination), the variations may be quite radical in the number, location, and pose of participants, or in architectural details. Moreover, it was not unusual for a figure or figures from one grouping to reappear several years later in other works. Day described himself as a voyeur, a witness, when confronting his figure paintings, which include several studio-based compositions. Changes (1982) is one of three canvases in Day’s Self LARRY DAY

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figure 88 Larry Day, Three Worlds, 1989. Oil on canvas, 66 × 48 in. Collection of Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia. Photo by Rick Echelmeyer. © Estate of Larry Day.

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Portrait Trilogy that highlight specific painting movements of importance to his work. Mannerism is the focus in Changes, while the other two paintings in the Trilogy reference neoclassicism and romanticism. Day made an effort to be as conscious as possible in his use of symbolism and allusion—he was aware of their implications and acknowledged that there always would be elements beyond his conscious control. In Changes, the paintings behind the artist and model reference works by Rosso Fiorentino and Joachim Uytewael, representing Day’s origins—his Italian father and Anglo-Saxon mother. The young woman standing behind the artist is a former student, incorporating Day’s role as teacher into the studio setting. Walls being essential to Day’s sense of spatial separation, the architectural structure in Changes features a wall from the Pennsylvania home he had moved away from several years before he created the painting. Day was fully aware of the importance of fragmentation to late twentieth-century art. Yet his concern was with wholeness and totality, and with the conflicts and contrasts that occur within such situations. Rosenthal’s notion of ironic realism struck him as a perfect grounding of his ideas, which he contextualized in the writings of Thomas Mann, whom he closely associated with irony. Day likewise believed that an artist can never achieve specific goals, but rather is compelled by the process of discovery to continue working. For him, the art of painting was a constant and ongoing mystery. Encounters with place were always on a deeply analytical level. In contrast to the voyeur role in his figure compositions, Day viewed himself as a participant in the site paintings. Although the places he depicted existed before he encountered them, and would remain long beyond his communications with them, he imagined them as waiting for him, a painter, to confront them. In some instances, it is not immediately clear whether these are welcoming or off-putting places—or both at different times, depending on the artist’s changing thought patterns. Day’s concern with layered meanings is cogently established in Three Worlds (1989). His engagement with Renaissance painting is evident, while he also is referencing the Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise of Dante Alighieri. Space, balance, and echo are critical here and throughout the site paintings. So, too, is the structural focus on walls mentioned earlier: as dividers, but also often incorporating a frieze-like character to further enhance their allusive role. Day’s approach to his art becomes denser and more referentially complex as it threads through the decades, embedding into his visual totalities the looking, reading, listening, and careful mulling over that he brought to all of these dominant elements in his life. NOTES 1.  My appreciation goes to Charles C. Eldredge for inviting me to be part of this fascinating volume, and to Robert Godfrey and Tessa Haas for comments on a draft of this essay. Full disclosure: I met Larry Day around 1960, when I was nineteen years old; and married him in 1983, when I was forty-two and he was two decades older. I fell in love with his work long before I fell in love with the man.

FOR FURTHER READING Bindman, David, et al. Body Language: The Art of Larry Day. Philadelphia: Woodmere Art Museum, 2021. Oral History with Larry Day, February 21, 1991. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

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PATRICIA HILLS

MAY STEVENS b. 1924, Dorchester, Massachusetts d. 2019, Santa Fe, New Mexico

My Brilliant Friend May Stevens: Working-Class Artist, Poet, and Antiracist, Feminist Activist

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with May Stevens opens a path to sketch the life and art of an unforgettable and extraordinary artist. Early in 1976, the critic Lawrence Alloway suggested that I visit the studio of Stevens, whom I knew about but had never met. He aimed to persuade me to write an article on Stevens, Alice Neel, and Alloway’s wife, Sylvia Sleigh, all scheduled for a three-person exhibition at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York. After my initial studio visit, Stevens and her husband, Rudolf Baranik, became good friends with my husband, Kevin Whitfield, our children, and myself. We all shared the politics of antiracism, feminism, and societal change. When I was pregnant with my third child, Andrew, she took photographs and included me in her painting Mysteries and Politics (1978, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art). I moved continually closer to her over the years. In 1982—when she was mourning the suicide of her son—I suggested we mount a traveling exhibition of her work at the Boston University Art Gallery, of which I was then director. The four of us spent holidays together in New York or Cambridge, Massachusetts, and we visited them at their various summer artist residencies—in BRIEF MEMOIR OF MY FRIENDSHIP

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Peterborough, New Hampshire; Santa Fe, New Mexico; and Skowhegan, Maine. Stevens and I were constant companions during her 1988–89 artist residency at the Bunting Institute in Cambridge, where I lived at the time. After Baranik’s death in 1998, she spent almost every Christmas holiday with us until 2013 and often paid summer visits to our beach house on the Jersey Shore. In 2002, as plans were being made to mount a major traveling retrospective exhibition of her art, I began in earnest to tape-record her memories; that research resulted in the book May Stevens (2005), which accompanied the exhibition. (Full disclosure: When she died I agreed to be co-executor of her estate and trust, along with my stepdaughter Emily.) — May Stevens often spoke of her working-class parents, their two-family house, and their neighborhood in Quincy, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. Her father, Ralph Stevens, a pipe fitter at the nearby Bethlehem Steel shipyards, was racist, anti-Catholic, and antiSemitic—views he espoused freely at home. Her mother, Alice, a poorly educated IrishCanadian who loved to read, had been a waitress before assuming the tasks of homemaker and caregiver for Stevens’s brother Stacy, who died at fifteen from complications of childhood diabetes. Stevens, however, flourished in school, showed an early talent for art, and had bosom friends. After high school she enrolled in the Massachusetts School of Art (now the Massachusetts College of Art and Design), well known for its teacher training, from which she graduated in 1946. Determined to be an artist, in 1947 Stevens moved to New York City—to her a place of postwar adventure. Enrolled in Art Students League classes, she met one of the instructors, Rudolf Baranik, a U.S. Army veteran. His Jewish Lithuanian parents had been murdered by Lithuanian fascists even before the 1941 Nazi occupation. Stevens and Baranik fell in love, married, and left for Paris in 1948, he to enroll in art classes on the GI Bill, she to paint and care for their child, Steven, born late that year in Paris. Their three-year sojourn was successful. They met other artists, and she studied briefly at the Académie Julian. They also showed in Parisian exhibitions; her first solo show was at Galerie Huit on the Left Bank. In 1951 she painted her first political work, The Martinsville Seven (unlocated). The subject was the seven Black men accused, tried, retried, and executed in 1951 for the alleged gang rape, two years earlier, of a white woman in Martinsville, Virginia. Civil rights for Blacks would be a lifelong theme of her art and her conversations. Back in New York in 1951, the two artists first lived in the suburbs, cared for their son, and took various jobs. In 1962 the family moved to Washington Heights in upper Manhattan, where their son enrolled in the High School of Music and Art. By this time Stevens was teaching at the School of Visual Arts, where she continued to teach part-time for thirty-five years. She also focused on her career and on exhibiting socially relevant art; the theme of her first solo show at the Roko Gallery in 1963 was “Freedom Riders.” During the 1960s, the two artists increasingly moved in the circles of other leftist artists and joined antiwar organizations, such as the War Resisters League, in which their friend Grace Paley was active. Artists and Writers Protest Against the War in Vietnam also held MAY STEVENS

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figure 89a Two-page spread from Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, no. 1 (January 1977). May Stevens, Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg, 1976. © May Stevens Trust.

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figure 89b Two-page spread from Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, no. 1 (January 1977). May Stevens, Two Women, 1976. © May Stevens Trust.

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figure 90 May Stevens, The Artist’s Studio (After Courbet), 1974. Acrylic on canvas, 78 × 144 in. Collections of the University of Missouri-St. Louis. © May Stevens Trust.

demonstrations. In early 1967, the couple participated in Angry Arts Week and lent works to New York University’s Loeb Student Center for the exhibition Collage of Indignation. By 1968 they had moved to two studio lofts at 97 Wooster Street in SoHo. During the 1970s, Baranik became well known for his abstract “Napalm Elegies” series and was active in the anti– Vietnam War organization Artists Meeting for Cultural Change. Stevens had begun her “Big Daddy” series, fiercely satirical paintings in a pop art style and based on family photographs of her racist father. In 2004 she recalled the mindset of herself and her friends during the late 1960s: “Why not use art’s power to help stop a war?”1 As an artist and teacher, she became increasingly involved in the feminist movement. Along with friends Lucy Lippard, Joyce Kozloff, Joan Braderman, Harmony Hammond, Elizabeth Hess, and others, she became a founding member in 1976 of Heresies, the women’s collective. Meetings of the group were held in Stevens’s studio, and the first issue of its magazine, Heresies (January 1977), included a two-page spread of Stevens’s collages Two Women and Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg. These collages would launch her thematic series “Ordinary/Extraordinary,” in which large paintings completed over a dozen years contrast the lives of the Marxist activist Rosa Luxemburg and Stevens’s mother, Alice. Stevens also produced an artist’s book in 1980 that combined crudely beautiful photocopies of Rosa and Alice with their words. Introducing their letters, Stevens wrote: 192

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figure 91 Gay Block, May Stevens, 1999. Courtesy of Gay Block. Photo © Gay Block. Artwork in photo © May Stevens Trust.

Ordinary. Extraordinary. A collage of words and images of Rosa Luxemburg, Polish/German revolutionary leader and theoretician, murder victim (1871–1919), juxtaposed with images and words of Alice Stevens (born 1895–) housewife, mother, washer and ironer, inmate of hospitals and nursing homes. A filmic sequence of darks and lights moving through close-up to longview and back. Oblique. Direct. Fragments of Rosa’s thought from intimate notes sent from prison to her comrade and lover, Leo Jogiches, and to her friends; from agit-prop published in Die Rote Fahne; and from her serious scientific writings. Images from her girlhood, her middle life, and the final photograph of her murdered head. Alice’s words from the memory of and letters to her daughter. An artist’s book examining and documenting the mark of a political woman and marking the life of a woman whose life would otherwise be unmarked. Ordinary. Extraordinary.2

For Stevens and other feminist artists, it was not enough to call out sexism (and racism), but to create a new kind of history painting: to position present-day women as powerful beings of accomplishment—having both families and fulfilling lives in the studio or workplace. Three works by Stevens did just that: Mysteries and Politics, SoHo Women Artists (1978, National Museum of Women in the Arts), and The Artist’s Studio (After Courbet). Like Gustave Courbet, she believed that an artist’s experiences mattered, that all art should be of one’s MAY STEVENS

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own time, and that painting was a political act. Answering an artist’s questionnaire from the National Academy of Design, she wrote: “To be an artist means being open to and responsible to the world around you.”3 She also participated in the street activism of the Guerrilla Girls, a group she joined in the mid-1980s. In the 1990s, Stevens turned to a new theme, “writing on water”: women in boats, empty boats, women walking along the banks of rivers. Stretching across the surfaces of water are rows of tiny, barely legible handwriting—passages drawn from the writings of “her feminist mothers,” such as an ancient Chinese sex manual that emphasized women’s pleasuring, the contemporary theorist Julia Kristeva, and others. As Stevens approached eighty, rivers and tidal swirls without women became another series. These works alluded to the deaths of her son and her husband, whose ashes she and friends deposited in various rivers associated with Rudolf Baranik. Elegiac but not sad, to her such paintings were life affirming: “I would like to see death as not a final thing and not necessarily a fearsome thing, but something which permeates life.” Stevens died at the age of ninety-five in Santa Fe. For the New York Times (December 26, 2019), art critic Holland Cotter headlined her as an artist “who turned art into activism.” Lucy Lippard, Stevens’s friend for over fifty years, who oversaw Stevens’s nursing care during her last years, wrote an obituary for Artforum (March 2020) that captured the essence of Stevens as I also knew her: “May was a great reader, and a poet and writer with an original voice. . . . She hated pretension. She was inquisitive, outspoken, and sometimes tactless—in which case, Rudolf would say, ‘That’s not the real May.’ She was publicly tough but privately vulnerable, given the tragedies she had survived.” In short, May Stevens was unforgettable. NOTES 1.  Patricia Hills, May Stevens (Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate, 2005), 64. Unless otherwise noted, other comments by the artist are taken from this volume. 2.  May Stevens, Artist’s Book (New York: privately printed, 1980). 3.  National Academy of Design, artist files: May Stevens, ca. 2004.

FOR FURTHER READING Hills, Patricia. May Stevens. Petaluma, CA: Pomegranate, 2005. . “Painting History as Lived Feminist Experience.” In Patricia M. Burnham and Lucretia Giese, eds., Redefining American History Painting. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. May Stevens: Ordinary/Extraordinary, A Summation. Preface by Patricia Hills. Essays by Donald Kuspit, Lucy Lippard, Moira Roth, and Lisa Tickner. Boston: Boston University Art Gallery, 1984. Stevens, May. “Art and Class: A Personal View.” The Fox 3 (1976): 181–182. . Artist’s Book. New York: privately printed, 1980. . “Looking Backward in Order to Look Forward: Memories of a Racist Girlhood.” Heresies 15 (1982): 22–23. Tanboukou, Maria. “Narratives from Within: An Arendtian Approach to Life Histories and the Writing of History.” Journal of Educational Administration and History 42, no. 2 (2010): 115–131.

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CÉCILE WHITING

CHRISTINA RAMBERG b. 1946, Fort Campbell, Kentucky d. 1995, Naperville, Illinois

Christina Ramberg: The Body Reimagined

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while still an undergraduate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she obtained her BFA in 1968 and her MFA in 1973. In 1971 she enlarged her scale and broadened her repertoire to include the female torso, typically truncated at the neck and knees and armored in tightfitting girdles, lacy corsets, and “pointy bust” bras. Plumbing fashion illustrations, etiquette manuals, lingerie catalogues, comics, and medical illustrations from an earlier era while painting in sober colors of ochre, brown, and black, Ramberg portrayed hairstyles and lingerie that evoked the 1940s and 1950s. And yet her imagery does not merely mimic her popular culture sources. The extra darts, seams, and insets transform these undergarments into ornate, slightly threatening apparel, while the hairstyles display impossibly complicated knots, curls, and twists. Because of the ways in which Ramberg altered her sources, her works from the 1960s and 1970s offered a feminist critique of beauty culture—though she never called herself a feminist or allied herself with the feminist art movement in Chicago. In the mid-1970s, she shifted direction again by representing gender-indeterminate torsos, which she produced until 1981. At that point, she turned away from the body and took up quilting and abstraction. The 1970s were HRISTINA RAMBERG STARTED PAINTING

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a particularly rich period of artistic investigation in Ramberg’s career, and her imagery from that period still speaks in compelling ways about gender and the sexual politics of the body. Ramberg enjoyed significant local recognition during her short lifetime. (She died in 1995, at age forty-nine, of early-onset dementia.) She first exhibited at the Hyde Park Art Center in 1968, in a group show titled False Image, which featured students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who aligned with an older generation of artists who had adopted the group name “The Hairy Who.” Throughout Ramberg’s lifetime, this multigenerational collective exhibited together as “The Chicago Imagists.” Simultaneously, starting in 1973, Ramberg pursued a successful career as a teacher at the School of the Art Institute, where she chaired the painting and drawing department for a number of years. Despite her well-established position in Chicago artistic circles, her reputation remained regional. Ramberg’s paintings address a central concern of second-wave feminism: the prescriptive ideals of female beauty culture. Beginning in the late 1960s, many young women repudiated the artifice of beauty culture and instead grew long straight hair, rejected cosmetics, and shed bras and girdles. Within such a political moment, Ramberg’s depictions of dated hairdos and constraining lingerie and other support undergarments exuded irony, and may even have pointed to a sadomasochistic aspect of these previous fashion practices. While none of Ramberg’s pictures of hair imitate precise hairstyles, the pleats, knots, and braids depicted in her pictures nonetheless evoke the elaborate and labored hair designs of the 1950s—beehives, bouffants, and poodles—and even the flips of the early 1960s. Ramberg’s paintings exaggerate the artifice of these hairdos while undercutting their ability to create a pleasing feminine appearance. Indeed, the consistent absence of a face makes it impossible to regard these masses of hair as an embellishment of a person rather than uncanny, if not fetishistic, ornaments. Taking this practice to an extreme, Untitled (ca. 1975) completely detaches four patches of braided hair from any semblance of a head whatsoever. The painting arrays the hair like bonbons tucked in wrappers, each tinted a different pastel hue. The painting wryly invites the viewer to imagine popping a hairball rather than a chocolate into her mouth. When Ramberg began to depict the female torso, she evoked lacy, intricately designed, and frequently tight lingerie, most dating from the 1950s. Although faces continue to be absent in Ramberg’s pictures, such details as a hint of neck or of hair curling down the back suggest the presence of a head beyond the frame, just as a peek of thigh below panties or girdle hints at the extension of legs. Yet mostly, the pictures dwell on the lingerie and the torso, always from a very proximate position. Ramberg claimed that she based these pictures on memories of watching her mother getting dressed for public appearances and transforming her body into a desirable shape with elaborate undergarments.1 Her paintings depict lingerie as both seductive and constraining. Ramberg described corsets in her journal with

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figure 92 Christina Ramberg, Untitled, ca. 1975. Acrylic on Masonite, 6 ¾ × 6 ¾ in. Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. The Bill McClain Collection of Chicago Imagism. © The Estate of Christina Ramberg.

these words: “Containing, restraining, re-forming, hurting, compressing, binding, transforming a lumpy shape into a clean smooth line.”2 The choice of gerunds points to the painful, even sadistic function of corsets as their elastics and wires cinch waists, tuck buttocks tight, and push up breasts. Yet Ramberg’s torsos often contain inexplicable and disturbing details that puncture any fantasy of feminine submissiveness. The title of Black Widow (1971), for instance, evokes both undergarment and deadly spider. The “Merry Widow” corset dates to 1952, when it was

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figure 93 Christina Ramberg, Black Widow, 1971. Acrylic on Masonite, 31 × 18 ½ in. Collection of the Illinois State Museum. © The Estate of Christina Ramberg.

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figure 94 Christina Ramberg, Schizophrenic Discovery, 1977. Acrylic on Masonite, 49 × 37 in. David Owsley Museum of Art, Ball State University. Museum purchase, 1978.018.001 © The Estate of Christina Ramberg.

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marketed to coincide with the film The Merry Widow, starring Lana Turner in the role of a newly bereft, but far from grieving, widow. The strapless bra and boned corset sculpting an hourglass shape echoed the cinched waist of “The New Look” popularized by Christian Dior in the immediate postwar years. By replacing “merry” with “black,” Ramberg’s title places a sinister cast on the painting, as it evokes that male-devouring arachnid. In Ramberg’s painting, the black satin and lace of the corset contain a busty and weighty body. The fabric gathered at the calf—perhaps a skirt—adds heft to the legs while introducing ambiguity to the scene: Is she dressing or undressing? What is that fabric anyway? The corset makes her body recognizable as a female, but the fabric defamiliarizes the body’s contour and endows it with a threatening bulk and odd cloth appendages. In light of theories about female pleasure and desire developed by feminists after Ramberg’s paintings from the 1970s were completed, some of these works can also be interpreted retrospectively as offering the possibility of homoerotic allure through the inclusion of the hand of a second woman. In Probed Cinch (1971, private collection), a hand with red manicured nails explores beneath the narrow waist of the girdle. Likewise, in Shady Lacy (1971, private collection), the position and exaggerated size of the hand imply the presence of a second woman. Even if we cannot be certain that these female hands belong to someone else, they nonetheless invite viewers to imagine feeling what they see as their eyes pass closely over glossy hair and lacy lingerie. Shady Lacy may probe a bit further: a strand of hair tucked under the lacy seam of the panties intimates some sort of autoeroticism in which the figure revels in the sensual feel of her own glossy black hair and the delicate floral black lace touching her skin. Starting in the mid-1970s, Ramberg painted torsos with an ambiguous sexual identity, what we might today call queer, or gender-nonconforming, bodies. With a title highlighting irresolution, Hereditary Uncertainty (1977, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts) presents a torso wearing fragments of clothing—shirt, skirt, shorts—belonging to both men and women. The sexless mannequins in Hermetic Indecision (private collection) and Schizophrenic Discovery (both 1977) wear a combination of male and female clothing and do not display identifiable physical markers of sexual identity. Cloth wound around the right forearm in Hermetic Indecision and around the knees in Hereditary Uncertainty evoke gauze bandages used to cover injuries. In all three works the bodies come apart: in Hereditary Uncertainty, half of the body consists of strips of strangely misplaced, braided hair that outlines the torso, including its ribs; while in Hermetic Indecision and Schizophrenic Discovery, the limbs on the right disarticulate from the rest of the body. Given that these broken, wounded, wrapped bodies appear in the late 1970s, after the end of the American war in Southeast Asia, they cannot help but evoke wounded and dismembered veterans returning from war—or, more broadly, a society torn apart by war. In its reference to mental illness, a title such as Schizophrenic Discovery may also have held a personal resonance for Ramberg. Whatever possible reference these works may make to personal struggles or contemporary social conflicts, however, these sexless mannequins certainly confuse the binary of male and female irrevocably. 200

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NOTES 1.  Carol Becker, “Christina Ramberg in Retrospect,” in Christina Ramberg: A Retrospective 1968–1988 (Chicago: Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1988). 2.  Judith Russi Kirschner, “Formal Tease: The Drawings of Christina Ramberg,” in Christina Ramberg Drawings (Chicago: Gallery 400, University of Illinois at Chicago, 2000), 11.

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MELANEE C. HARVEY

BENNY ANDREWS b. 1930, Plainview, Georgia d. 2006, Brooklyn, New York

Benny Andrews Remembered

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catalyst in redefining American art during the last quarter of the twentieth century. As a painter, collagist, artist-activist, arts administrator, teacher, and author, he was an interlocutor across several artist communities, cultivating his leadership skills in artist-activist groups like the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition and the Art Workers’ Coalition. He also developed enduring friendships with figurative artists such as Raphael Soyer, Alice Neel, and Reginald Gammon. In 1986, following his tenure as visual arts director of the National Endowment for the Arts, he penned an essay for Art Papers titled “Decentralization: The Greening of American Art,” in which he simultaneously assessed the state of the fine arts and also revealed primary interests in his artistic practice. Advocating greater geographic diversity and wider recognition of veterans’ contributions to challenging the art-world status quo, Andrews writes: “This decentralization unleashes, through wider participation of its citizenry, art that is more innovative. Blacks, women, less formally educated and less economically well-off people will have greater access to the positive things that art offers society.”1 He envisioned a decentralized American art that conveyed the concerns around identity that came to define postmodern art. ENNY ANDREWS WAS AN INTEGRAL

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Andrews occupies an interstitial position in the American art canon across activist movements, postwar figuration, protest art, African American art, and artists from the American South. From the late 1960s onward, he experienced success, consistently exhibiting and having his art acquired by major art institutions.2 His public activities, his personal introspection, and his aesthetic decisions reflect his active engagement with defining and documenting the condition of the American artist. It is imperative to recognize the interventions Andrews made that reoriented the content, art process, and context of the American artist. His oeuvre progresses from American character studies to a series of epic cycles that encourage a critical form of looking at the figure and the surrounding environment to reveal social critique and convey universal human emotion. The connective threads he crafted during his lifetime reflect Lucy Lippard’s postmodernist definition of telling in its concern for “history, family, religion and storytelling . . . where the intercultural process began and weighs the burdens of the past on the present.”3 Andrews repeated the following origin story throughout his career, in order to frame the people, places, and universal qualities that define the American experience in his art: “I came from this. We were sharecroppers outside of Madison, Georgia. We were poor, but I came from a solid community. We had a full life. The people in the cabin were the foundation. If anything is going to last, they will.”4 Preserving these histories in his art, the artist returned to these firsthand experiences with the material facets of commerce and rural labor as a lasting conceptual base. Addressing the myriad experiences that informed his identity, Andrews noted that in his case, “racism was just one of the many problems I had. I had a class problem too you see. . . . We also had a problem of living in the country. . . . [I]t was not just to fight being a black person in a white society; it was also to fight being a poor person in a total society—both black and white.”5 This perspective informed Andrews in his selection of subjects and symbols. Alongside his mother’s emphasis on education, he witnessed his father, George Andrews, painting everyday objects. Benny Andrews described his father as “a personification of the mythical artist/poet who sees beauty through every pore, who is driven to create regardless of the circumstances.”6 This familial cultural context served as the cornerstone of his art process—channeling human emotion through material accumulation and figurative expressionism. Andrews developed an interest in refining tropes and symbols from his experience in the rural environment of Madison County, Georgia, that persisted throughout his service in the U.S. Air Force (1950–54) and art education at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1954– 58). Early paintings such as Janitors at Rest (1957, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York), Southern Pasture (1963, Detroit Institute of Arts), and The Long Rows (1966, Smithsonian American Art Museum) reflect his vacillation between oil painting and dimensional collage. His collages from the 1960s signal progress in constructing figures with a material and spatial relationship to the site they occupy. The 1970s paintings and drawings from his “Bicentennial Series” represent a new apex in his artwork as facial features (such as noses) and clothing project from the canvas to confront the viewer. Symbols (1971, Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita BENNY ANDREWS

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figure 95 Benny Andrews visiting his old home, a two-room, wood-framed house in Plainview, Georgia, where he lived from 1935 to 1943, n.d. © 2021 Estate of Benny Andrews; licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the Estate of Benny Andrews and Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York.

State University) assembles a cast of American social characters: “Miss Tennis Shoes USA,” “The Afro-American,” “The Klansman,” “The Exploiter,” and a host of other recurring figures. This surrealist-inspired landscape incorporates images of his childhood home, a simple and weathered wooden dwelling; it also incorporates Andrews’s own imaginative ecological system of trees, among them a local Georgia pine tree and his symbolic Tree of Life and the Sex Tree.7 The texture and dimension he creates by bundling canvas, linen, and other found material beckons the viewer to consider the shared experienced of humanity. Symbols is a signature work that reflects the artist’s willingness to continue to push the material boundaries of painting and figuration in critical examinations of American society. Andrews visually “tells” the story of the American artist in numerous self-portraits he created throughout his lifetime. Across examples like Artist as Artist (1964, private collection), Studio (1967, Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York), Teaching in Prison (1975, Benny Andrews Estate, New York), and Portrait of a Collagist (1989, Detroit Institute of Arts), he visually inserts himself into the debate on who represents and defines the image of the American artist. He created the 1960s self-portraits in the context of maneuvering through the New York art scene and gallery circuit. After receiving a membership offer from Forum Gallery, he experienced great resistance and ambivalence from gallery director Debbie 204

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figure 96 Benny Andrews, On the Right, 1972. Oil with fabric collage on canvas, 30 ½ × 24 ¼ in. High Museum of Art, Atlanta. Gift of Barbara and Ronald Davis Balser and Margaret and Hank McCamish Jr., 1982.135. © 2021 Estate of Benny Andrews; licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the Estate of Benny Andrews and Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York.

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figure 97 Benny Andrews, The Thrust, 1972. Reproduced in Benny Andrews, “I Teach Painting in Prisons and I Find a Cry for Love,” Art Material Trade News 25, no. 6 (June 1973), 17. © 2021 Estate of Benny Andrews; licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy of the Estate of Benny Andrews and Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York.

Fishko. In an October 1961 journal entry, Andrews accused Fishko of “playing politics” with him concerning the possibility of a solo show.8 As a keen participant-observer in the art world, he did not waiver in his feelings toward the power dynamics of the New York art scene. His self-portraits document this formative period of awareness and introspection. During the 1970s, Andrews was a central figure in developing and promoting art programs in prisons. Under the auspices of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, he led a program that offered art education, exhibition opportunities, and human rights advocacy to imprisoned populations in New York City. In the months following the Attica prison rebellion in August 1971, he taught his first art classes in November at the Tombs, a Manhattan detention facility. The artworks he created over the next year, such as On the Right, reflect the lasting impact the Attica rebellion had on the artist. Robert Schulz’s photographs of the prison riot 206

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illustrated news stories in the New York Times and were widely reproduced elsewhere, providing inspiration and a visual source for Andrews, as evidenced in their design similarities. In On the Right, Andrews emphasized a familiar protest pose from the period, a raised fist, here extending from the U.S. flag draped over the figure’s shoulder. The left side of the protester is balanced with a textured, painted area that muddles red, blue, and beige. Andrews also produced drawings documenting his time working with his incarcerated art students. The Thrust (1972) is explicit in its content, framing the prison art program as a liberatory tool to break through oppressive social structures that necessitate prisons. An under-examined aspect of Andrews’s oeuvre, these artworks inspired by the people and events of the Attica uprising allow us to more fully understand his art in the Black Arts Movement era. About a week after his first art class, the New York Times published a photograph of Andrews teaching figurative drawing before three African American men at the Tombs. The teaching and curating he did through this program are a brief but important chapter in his art career, significant in advancing his “decentralized” definition of the American artist. The unifying thread across Andrews’s oeuvre centers on his commitment to exploiting the full conceptual and expressive potential of painting everyday facets of life. In a 1993 letter to his friend Reginald Gammon, Andrews framed his art practice as “ ‘downright genre,’ [filling] society’s need to have original painted pictures of African Americans like they look.”9 Benny Andrews pursued this goal throughout his career, employing figuration, nontraditional materials, and advocacy to “decentralize” American art, to problematize narrow conceptions of American identity, and to document the diversity of the United States. NOTES 1.  Benny Andrews, “Decentralization: The Greening of American Art,” Art Papers (March/April, 1986): 15. 2.  Andrews’s art has anchored defining exhibitions of American art, including Tradition and Conflict: Images of a Turbulent Decade, 1963–1973 (1985, Studio Museum in Harlem), Imagination of Homeland: The Southern Presence in Twentieth Century Art (1996, Atlanta’s Nations Bank Plaza), Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties (2014, Brooklyn Museum), and Artists Respond: American Art and the Vietnam War, 1965–1975 (2019, Smithsonian American Art Museum). 3.  Lucy Lippard, Mixed Blessings: New Art in Multicultural America (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), 57. 4.  Cover, Benny Andrews: Paintings & Drawings (Baltimore: University of Maryland, 1972), Lois Mailou Jones Collection, Box 215–24, Folder 9, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. 5.  Phil Williams and Linda Williams, “Interview: The Art of Benny Andrews,” Ataraxia 4 (1975): 12. 6.  Benny Andrews, “Interviews: George Andrews,” Art Journal 53 (Spring 1994): 22. His family provided additional models of artistic creativity. His younger brother, Raymond Andrews, pursued a career as a novelist, whose books were illustrated by Benny. 7.  Benny Andrews, “Symbols Diagram,” Symbols and Other Works by Benny Andrews: April 25 to June 6 (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1971), Lois Mailou Jones Collection, Box 215–24, Folder 9, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University. 8.  Artist Journal, October 1, 1961, Benny Andrews Papers, 1945–1968, Reel N62, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 9.  Benny Andrews, Letter to Reginald Gammon, April 5, 1993, Reginald Gammon Papers, 1927–2007, Bulk 1960–2005, Box 1, Folder 21, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

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FOR FURTHER READING Andrews, Benny. Between the Lines: 70 Drawings and 7 Essays. New York: Pella, 1978. Gruber, J. Richard, Benny Andrews, and Morris Museum of Art. American Icons: From Madison to Manhattan, the Art of Benny Andrews, 1948–1997. Augusta, GA: Morris Museum of Art, 1997. harrisburg, halley k [sic], and Hooper Turner. Benny Andrews: The Bicentennial Series. New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 2016. McDaniels, Pellom, and Michael Rosenfeld Gallery. Benny Andrews: The Bicentennial Series: Symbols, Trash, Circle, Sexism, War, Utopia: November 8, 2016–January 21, 2017. Wallace, Caroline V. “Exhibiting Authenticity: The Black Emergency Cultural Coalition’s Protests of the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1968–71.” Art Journal 74, no. 2 (2015): 5–23.

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PAUL K ARLSTROM

JEROME DAVID CAJA b. 1958, Cleveland, Ohio d. 1995, San Francisco, California

Jerome Caja’s Provocative Legacy

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the most interesting, unconventional, original—and transgressive—artist I encountered in my thirty-year career documenting artists for the Smithsonian Institution’s research collections.1 Although Caja (Slovak American, pronounced Chaya) attracted a devoted constituency in San Francisco, it was largely limited to the radical queer drag component of the gay community and did not necessarily extend to the broader art world. Even within the gay population, there was disapproval on the part of those who conformed to more general social norms. His paintings at that point had limited public visibility. I discovered Jerome (as he is best known) accidentally. We moved in different circles, and he first came to my attention through a phone call to the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art from his devoted friend, Anna van der Meulen, who had met Jerome when both were art students at Cleveland State University. In my first conversation with her, she was highly persuasive, concerned that a unique talent operating on the extreme margins of society was about to die with his contribution to art history unrecognized. Van der Meulen convinced me that I should at least visit her friend. It turned out that he was practically a San Francisco neighbor. I was EROME CAJA WAS UNQUESTIONABLY

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won over completely upon entering his cluttered, third-floor flat, its walls covered with small paintings created from the makeup of his drag queen persona: eyeliner, nail polish, mascara, glitter, and lipstick. I was astounded by the beauty of these oddly compelling, entirely original works. On my first visit, he greeted me from a chaise longue where he reclined, wearing a sheer peignoir. I told him that he reminded me of Manet’s Olympia, a comparison that delighted him. We talked about having the smaller works, his “little lovelies” as he called them, and his papers go to the Archives. He seemed thrilled by the prospect of being represented in the national collections. Jerome was not as hostile to the “establishment” as his lifestyle and counterculture persona might have indicated. He had the standard artist’s hope that his work would be exhibited at important institutions and accepted into their collections. Jerome valued his work and, facing imminent death, saw it as his legacy. Born in Cleveland in 1958 into a religious Catholic family, Jerome Caja moved west in 1984 to attend the San Francisco Art Institute, where he earned an MFA degree. The quasi– comic book style he adopted for some of his imagery is misleading. Technically adept, he also knew art history and drew upon it to express his own personal worldview. He particularly admired Goya, whose horrific Saturn Devouring His Son (1819–23) inspired Jerome’s own Charles Devouring Himself (1991, location unknown). Counting among his other favorites Giotto, Bosch, Bruegel, Egon Schiele, Otto Dix, and George Grosz, Jerome developed, from a personal iconography, imagery whose decoding requires knowledge of his “disguised” symbolism. Nothing in Jerome’s art was random or disconnected from the various art historical approaches to conveying meaning. The overtly and often comically homoerotic content that dominates his paintings— landscapes and portraits notwithstanding—and his drag club performances endeared him to the radical queer world. Graphically obscene subjects had the predictable effect of turning off some of the mainstream art audience. This quality, along with his superficially unsophisticated style, may well be the primary reasons for Jerome’s limited reception and ghettoized status. He was the drag art darling to his own coterie. His work is entirely serious, but it has not been widely considered so until recently. That has been changing under the current, overdue wave of attention paid to long-marginalized groups, among them the sexually self-identified LGBTQ+. Jerome fits perfectly into that cohort because of the focus in his work on gender fluidity and sexuality as identity. His performances especially define the San Francisco Skag/Trash Drag of the 1990s. Nonetheless, Jerome should be viewed more as an independent, a gifted outlier, than as a member of any art grouping. But the quality that drew me to Jerome’s work was his insistence that he and his obsessive art be taken on their own terms. That is arguably the only way to approach his most outlandish creations, focused as they are on male genitalia, multi-partner sexual interaction, even urinary rituals—all depicted within the hovering presence of consequential death. The Angel of Death is a character, a major player, in Jerome’s elaborately transgressive worldview. These images, rendered playfully, enable confrontation with the dire human realities 210

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figure 98 Jerome Caja, Bozo Fucks Death, 1988. Nail polish on plastic tray, 7 ½ × 5 ¹/₅ × ½ in. Frank-Ratchye Collection. © Estate of Jerome Caja.

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depicted, notably in works such as the small Bozo Fucks Death. Painted on a tray, the clown is not only defying but subordinating death. I interviewed Jerome just months before his death in November 1995. He was a warm and lively subject—articulate, humorous, and entirely lacking in self-pity. AIDS, the relatively new and awful reality of sexually active gay life, is a major theme in his art. Jerome and Charles Sexton, a close friend and fellow artist, made a pact that whichever of them survived would use the cremains of the other in making art. Sexton died first, and true to his vow, Jerome painted a series using his friend’s ashes as the medium, literally transforming him into a work of art. The aesthetic depiction of death is seen in many of Jerome’s paintings, and among them are some of his most poignant portraits. Jerome told me in one of the interviews that he was not afraid of dying. One of eleven boys, he had been the weak and sickly exception in a “family of jocks.” He seemed to accept his physical limitations as part of his identity, which he internalized and incorporated into his art. He confided that he had “the sense that life is fragile.” Diagnosed as positive for HIV in 1989, he first showed symptoms in 1992. He complained that the various treatments were “killing me.” When I met Jerome, he was well on his way to blindness. But this bothered him less—“I have no problem losing my sight”—than the pain, which he described as “unbearable.” The small paintings done during these final years constitute a mature vision based on pain and reflecting courage. Jerome’s skeletons and related paintings have been aptly described as icons of death. His fantasy realm had instantly been transformed into a nightmare. But paintings like Bozo Fucks Death and especially The Last Hand Job (1993, collection of Anna van der Meulen) express acceptance and even defiance. In the latter, Jerome depicts himself with a greenish pallor and long blond hair, on his death bed being serviced by a sympathetic friend. At first, incorrectly, I assumed the figure to be a male drag colleague, but the indication of breasts caused me to wonder if this was a woman. Van der Meulen confirmed that she herself was the person depicted in that intimate role. Van der Meulen also informed me that many of the figures that appear to be men in drag are females. She elaborates that Jerome was fascinated by women and loved to look at them, wondering what it was like to be one. In fact, they are more realistically and appealingly portrayed than are the brutally caricatured men. Two small paintings, an Annunciation and a nude woman in a tiled shower, are splendid examples. The former shows the Madonna as a housewife wearing large yellow gloves as she washes dishes at the sink; she seems astonished by a visit from a small bottle of Dove detergent hovering on a cloud bringing her the message from Gabriel. The latter painting presents more puzzling imagery: a woman stands in a blue tiled shower, the water from the shower at her ear (another Annunciation?), while a levitating toaster plugged into her vagina pops out fried eggs. Despite, or perhaps because of, Jerome’s professed rejection of Catholicism, many paintings depict religious subjects, notably nuns, priests, saints, and Christ (or even the artist himself) on the cross. Some (crucified pigs, for instance) are sacrilegious, all are humorous, and subtle personal symbols abound. Iconographic similarities appear throughout the oeu212

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figure 99 Jerome Caja, The Annunciation, ca. 1995. Nail polish, enamel, and glitter on metal tray, mounted on iron rest, 5 × 3 ¹/₈ in. Private collection. © Estate of Jerome Caja. Photo by Anthony Cianciolo.

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figure 100 Jerome Caja, Venus in Cleveland, 1995. Nail polish, enamel, correction fluid, and glitter on paper, 9 × 7 in. Jerome Caja papers, 1920–1955, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. © Estate of Jerome Caja.

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vre: more eggs, angels, lascivious putti, clowns, condoms, sperm with faces, and (best of all) two self-portraits, tributes to Botticelli. He considered Venus in Cleveland, which he specified for donation to the Archives, his masterpiece. Jerome’s art took on a quality of defiant bravado, maintaining sex as the emblem of a thoroughly liberated lifestyle, an emancipation from the traditional rules and prohibitions that rendered existence difficult if not intolerable for those who refused to conform. His artistic goal was to depict the realities of life as lived by all oppressed groups who either choose, or are forced, to operate outside the margins of an insular conventional society. Jerome Caja was an authentic outlier whose legacy is an intentionally provocative imagery that lingers on to challenge assumptions and fire our imaginations. NOTES 1.  The Jerome Project LLC manages the artist’s estate. In addition to Caja’s friend and executor, Anna van der Meulen, I am indebted to the Project’s founding director, Anthony Cianciolo, who is preparing a documentary film. I have served on the Project Advisory Committee from its beginning. Also, I thank my wife, Ann Heath Karlstrom, for her usual and invaluable editorial contribution.

FOR FURTHER READING Avena, Thomas, and Adam Klein. Jerome: After the Pageant. San Francisco: Bastard Books, 1996. Duets: Nayland Blake and Justin Vivian Bond in Conversation on Jerome Caja. New York: Visual AIDS, 2018. Karlstrom, Paul. Oral history interview with Jerome Caja, August 23 and September 29, 1995. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-historyinterview-jerome-caja-12295#transcript.

JEROME DAVID CAJA

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MAKI K ANEKO

JIMMY TSUTOMU MIRIKITANI b. 1920, Sacramento, California d. 2012, New York, New York

Dining with Jackson Pollock: A Secret Recipe for Global Modernism

T

HE ART OF JIMMY TSUTOMU MIRIKITANI ,

which I have been wishing to bring to visibility for the past several years, has stubbornly defied my art historical efforts. Whenever I tried to introduce Mirikitani’s art in a reader-friendly, straightforward manner, I always failed. A supposedly brief account of the artist’s biography inevitably becomes a laundry list of Mirikitani’s complex identities, his multifold space-time of belonging (or non-belonging), and the entangled genealogies of his art. For example: Mirikitani was born to Japanese immigrant parents in Sacramento, California, but he was raised in Hiroshima, Japan. Mirikitani was a U.S. citizen by birth, but he was forced to renounce his citizenship during his incarceration at Tule Lake during World War II. Mirikitani was trained as a painter of nihonga (Japanese traditionalist-style paintings) in the 1930s in Japan, though his iconic works were made during his street life in New York City between 1986 and 2001.

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figure 101 Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, Cat Looking at Fish, ca. 2001. Colored pencil on+ paper, 29 × 19 ½ in. Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas. Museum purchase: R. Charles and Mary Margaret Clevenger Art Acquisition Fund, 2020.0220.

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Mirikitani’s works are based on his early training in Japanese painting, but they are rendered with unconventional materials that the artist salvaged from the New York streets. Though Mirikitani is known for colorful drawings of cats, fish, and flowers, political collages of the wartime incarceration, the atomic bombings of Japan, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks constitute a large portion of his oeuvre. With a lot of “while,” “but,” and “though,” a sense of consistency, coherence, conciseness, and above all historicity always escapes my account of Mirikitani’s biography. Mirikitani is not an unknown artist. His eventful life and art became widely known through the documentary film The Cats of Mirikitani (2006, dir. Linda Hattendorf), which enjoyed positive reviews and received some scholarly attention. Art historians, however, have remained largely silent about his art. I believe that this paucity of art historical investigation is due not only to the inaccessibility of Mirikitani’s works—the majority of surviving works are in private collections—but also to the difficulty, or perhaps the perceived inappropriateness, of pinning down his art into the existing categories and discourses of art history. After all, is Mirikitani’s art American, Japanese, Japanese American, or “stateless”? Should his work be classified as Japanese painting, New York avant-garde collage, or “timeless” outsider art? In which context can we most meaningfully interpret his art: immigration history, the Pacific War, Cold War diplomacy, or post-9/11 geopolitics? When pondering these questions in front of his art, I often hear its groan, which Rita Felski would translate as “Context Stinks!” Felski argues that context most often functions as “a kind of box” in which texts (or artworks) are “encased and held fast” and “diagnosed rather than heard.”1 Although I cannot entirely abandon contextualization, or what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick famously named “paranoid reading,” as a predilection in my research, Mirikitani’s work indeed demands to be heard, touched, and attended to rather than diagnosed, classified, and historicized.2 It urges us to step across the normative boundaries of time, space, and racial or national affiliations, thereby opening ourselves up to his version of “Japanese” “American” “art” “history.” Let me present a small case study using the work known as Grapes for Pollock. It is one of many collaged images through which Mirikitani speaks about his friendship with Jackson Pollock. The date of the work cannot be determined, but it is presumed to have been made after 2001. It is of modest size and made with ballpoint pen, crayons, and photo fragments. Mirikitani did not give it a title. The designation Grapes for Pollock was presumably, and I’d say performatively, given by the Wing Luke Museum, where this piece is currently located. The central motif is a grapevine, which attracts a butterfly and is accompanied by a bamboo tree, drawn loosely in the East Asian painting manner, all combined in a vertical hanging-scroll format. The lower part carries Mirikitani’s signatures, his hand-drawn seal, and an inscription about the provenance of his art: “Nihonga Premiere Position, landscape under the tutelage of Gyokudo,” “Buddhist painting mentored by Buzan,” “Year twelve 218

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figure 102 Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, Hiroshima, 2001. Mixed media on paper, 28 × 22 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Museum purchase made possible by the Ford Motor Company, 2008.32.3.

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figure 103 Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, Untitled (Grapes for Pollock), ca. 2001–06. Ballpoint pen, photo fragments, crayons, papers. Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, Seattle. Photo provided by Wing Luke Museum.

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Tokyo,” “resident of the Hiroshima Prefecture,” “Member of the Japan Art Academy,” and “age of 27 Columbia University era.” The left side carries a black-and-white photograph of a young Jackson Pollock and a color photograph of grapes. Under the photographs is a typed text narrating Mirikitani’s relationship with Pollock: Wild grapes. My friend Jackson Pollock found wild grapes on Montauk Point, near the lighthouse. He brought them to me and asked me to make him a pie. So I made him a wild grape pie. He lived in East Hampton, and had a big studio there. I stayed there with him for five days. He was a very deep friend. That’s the story.

Right next to this narrative is a Japanese inscription, presumably handwritten by Mirikitani himself. It reads: “My painter friend Jackson Pollock East Hampton Long Island youthful period youthful period.” I have frequently been asked questions about this work, and others like it, that begin “Is it true. . . .” Is it true that Mirikitani was a friend of Pollock? Is it true that Mirikitani learned Japanese painting from Gyokudō and Buzan (both extremely well-established, Japanesestyle painters)? Is it true that Mirikitani was affiliated with Columbia University? Is it true that Pollock loved pie? My blunt response is “I don’t care (about your truth value),” but I am inclined to say “yes” to the last question. (Look at Robyn Lea’s brilliant book, Dinner with Jackson Pollock: JIMMY TSUTOMU MIRIKITANI

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Recipes, Art & Nature.) What I do care about is how Grapes for Pollock unfolds an intimate relationship between the two artists, one who has been the paragon of post-1945 American art and the other who remained anonymous until the 2006 film, two who have not yet met each other in the current narratives of art history. Certain parts of the story that Grapes for Pollock narrates are not entirely untold. In the past two decades, Asian (Japanese in particular) influences on and interactions with post1945 American art have been eagerly studied under the banners of “multiple modernisms,” “de-centering modernism,” and “global modernism.” Today, it is not too difficult to find at least a few Asian-sounding names in survey textbooks of post-1945 American art. Grapes for Pollock neither strongly counters nor claims an additive spot within this now canonical narrative of U.S.-Japan artistic interactions. It indeed speaks loudly about the friendship of Mirikitani and Pollock, but such a claim is made not through their “heroic” artistic exchanges in artist studios in New York City, but in their shared enjoyment of harvesting, cooking, and dining together in an East Hampton home. The grape motif appears to play an important role in narrating their close relationship and the connectivity of their arts. On the formal level, the grape is the only motif represented twice in this work, through his drawing and a pasted photograph, as if Mirikitani was trying to connect his memory with the “real” world. The swirling line of the grapevine is reminiscent of both East Asian calligraphic brushwork and the Pollockian gestural line; Mirikitani called his swirling lines “a Pollock style.” Beyond the East-West division, in terms of iconography the grape is a ubiquitous artistic motif: as an attribute of Dionysus, an icon of Christ’s blood, a symbol of perpetuity in Zen Buddhism, and so on. Gastronomically, grapes are Pollock’s favorite food, Mirikitani’s favorite ingredient, and, according to World Atlas, one of the most popular fruits in the world. Grapes for Pollock invites us to attend to the two men’s intimacy, not only through the formal similarities of their arts, but also through the smell, touch, and taste of wild grapes that Pollock harvested for Mirikitani and a pie that Mirikitani made for Pollock. Indeed, Mirikitani’s work invites us to envision a possible past and future of transnational artists’ communities that operate not only through the masculine logic of art making, but also through the quotidian and possibly more affective practice of sharing foods, a kitchen table, and a secret recipe. NOTES 1.  Rita Felski, “Context Stinks!,” New Literary History 42, no. 4 (2011): 577; Rita Felski, Use of Literature (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 6. 2.  Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “This Essay Is about You,” in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–151.

FOR FURTHER READING Hattendorf, Linda, dir. The Cats of Mirikitani. Arts Alliance America, 2006. Kaneko, Maki. “Bijutsushi kara mita Mirikitani [Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani from an Art Historical Perspective].” In Mirikitani no neko [The Cats of Mirikitani] movie booklet and webpage, 2016. http:// nekonomirikitani.com/background/history.html. 222

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Shapiro, Michael. “Hiroshima Temporalities.” Thesis Eleven 129, no. 1 (2015): 40–56. Wakida, Patricia. “Jimmy Mirikitani.” Densho Encyclopedia. https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Jimmy_ Mirikitani/. Yoshikawa, Masa. Peace Cats: “Mirikitani no neko” gabunshū [Peace Cats: “The Cats of Mirikitani” Pictures and Texts]. Tokyo: Randamuhausu kōdansha, 2007.

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AMY SCOTT

HARRY FONSECA Nisenan Maidu, Hawaiian, Portuguese b. 1946, Sacramento, California d. 2006, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Harry, I understand, Coyote brother, the how and why and why not Coyote needs to laugh—so we can love those who make us feel contradictions we need to see, that we need to realize, that we need to know what our lives have become! simon ortiz (acoma), poet 1

Harry Fonseca: Coyote Leaves the Res

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Harry Fonseca traveled from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to paint at his sister’s home on the Shingle Springs Rancheria, some forty miles east of Sacramento, California. It was land that had nourished his ancestors for centuries, yet Fonseca was there to investigate another aspect of its history, namely the state-sponsored campaign of murder and massacre waged against California’s Native peoples beginning in 1846 and lasting for three decades. As the historian Hubert Howe Bancroft summarized in 1890, “The savages were in the way, the miners and settlers were arrogant and impatient. . . . It was one of the last human hunts of civilization, and the basest and most brutal of them all.”2 By the time Fonseca arrived at the site, the near total annihilation of California’s Indigenous peoples remained—at least for most nonNative peoples—a sad footnote buried in the myth of westward expansion. Against this background of abuse and neglect, Fonseca set out to explore the original scene of the crime. On the smooth rocks that lined the banks of the American River, where gold was discovered some 150 years earlier, he spread out several small sheets of thick watercolor N THE SUMMER OF 1997,

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figure 104 Harry Fonseca, The Discovery of Gold in California series, 1997. Displayed in the Human Nature exhibition, Bank of America Gallery, Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles. Photo by Carmel France.

paper. Onto these he dripped ochre, rust brown, gold, green, and blue paint, hunching over as he moved around and between the sheets. On some, he flung dark red paint, and dirt from the ground, or sprinkled tiny bits of pyrite, the sparkly mineral better known as fool’s gold. Seen individually or arranged in a grid as Fonseca intended, these remarkable little paintings represent a mingling of the artist’s physical and emotional landscapes. The dirt and rocks embedded in their surfaces form a literal topography of the riverbank, while the red paint spatters evoke the blood-soaked ground, the violence suffered, and the intergenerational trauma that lingers within Fonseca’s community to this day. Fonseca would later claim that he went to the site intending to make a much smaller series of about four paintings, but that as he worked he became immersed in the process: “I lost myself . . . and transcended the subject matter after painting over one hundred and fifteen of them.”3 The Discovery of Gold in California places Fonseca firmly within the increasingly experimental and bold generation of artists that emerged from Native America in the years after World War II, when the GI Bill enabled some Native veterans to seriously pursue art careers. In 1961, the experimental Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) was founded on top of the more restrictive Santa Fe Indian School, attracting talent like Fritz Scholder (Luiseno, 1937– 2005) and T. C. Cannon (Caddo/Kiowa, 1946–78), both of whom delighted in critiquing HARRY FONSECA

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romantic stereotypes of Native people through the lens of their contemporary experience. While there was no single tribal or cultural group that drove this work, the existence of IAIA alongside an expanding infrastructure of galleries, museums, and the annual Southwest American Indian Arts Market cemented the role of Santa Fe, New Mexico, as its creative hub. Meanwhile, in California, the Native occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay that began on November 20, 1969, and lasted for nineteen months lent visibility to Indigenous rights by calling out historical inequality, drawing a parallel between the remote island lacking in resources and the federal reservation system. Determined to resist stereotypical and racist images of Native people as either romanticized relics or reservation wards, the Red Power movement was reinforced by influential scholars such as Vine Deloria Jr., whose 1969 book Custer Died for Your Sins laid bare the conjoined impact of oppressive federal policies, the Christian church, and twentieth-century anthropology on Native communities by stripping them of their traditional culture in the name of “assimilation,” while simultaneously painting Native peoples as antimodern and incompatible with contemporary American society. While the 1960s and 1970s witnessed a growing awareness of Indigenous peoples as critical actors and agents of change within American society, California’s distinct Native communities remained comparatively invisible, buried in the popular media by images of headdresses and streetwear at Alcatraz. (The action on the island was largely conceived and carried out by activists from around the country or from communities brought to the Bay Area by the American Indian in Relocation Program of the 1950s.) While Fonseca did not spend time at Alcatraz, he was often nearby in San Francisco, where a liberated social environment encouraged him to explore his sexuality. (Fonseca came out as gay around this time.) Back home in Sacramento, he also became deeply involved with the cultural revival taking place within his Maidu community; in this he was inspired by his uncle, Henry Azbill, a member of the board of directors of the American Indian Historical Society whom Fonseca recalled as “a man who knew his traditions and lived in a contemporary world at the same time.”4 Like Azbill, Fonseca would come to view the revival of traditional dances, language, and the making of art as a form of activism through resisting erasure and promoting community healing. It was during this period of personal discovery, cultural activism within the Native community, and legislative achievements on a national scale (such as the 1978 American Indian Religious Freedom Act) that Fonseca created his first paintings featuring Coyote. The subject was the legendary trickster and gifted performer that was capable of meeting expectations of what “Indian art” looks like while also subverting or upending the same. Unlike the wooden, bandana-wearing, howling coyote figurines that filled curio and trinket shops across the Southwest, Fonseca’s Coyote possessed a remarkable ability to shift seamlessly from one identity to the next, making him an effective avatar for the artist as a mixed-race gay man. He appeared initially in Fonseca’s art as a shaggy and snarling creature on all fours, posed in front of a graffiti-covered brick wall in San Francisco’s Mission District. The closedin site symbolizes the oppression for Native peoples; Coyote was, as the artist claimed, “of226

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figure 105 Harry Fonseca, Coyote on the Streets, 1994. Acrylic on canvas, 29 × 34 × 1 ½ in. © 2016 Harry Fonseca Collection, Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles, 2016.10.188.

ten up against a brick wall as are so many Native peoples. . . . [A]s soon as you’re born, you’re up against a wall. But it’s what you do when faced with obstacles that matter.”5 If Coyote’s animal nature points to the irony of his appearance in the city, the figure quickly adapted to urban life in subsequent works by standing erect and wearing jeans, a motorcycle jacket, sunglasses, and platform shoes. As he sports trendy clothes while keeping his sharp teeth, bushy tail, and sideways glance fully on display, Fonseca’s Coyote embodied the subtle irreverence and biting wit that many Native people used to navigate a contemporary world biased against them. In 1979, Fonseca moved to Santa Fe, a creative hub where the conjoined forces of an empowered Native community, the pedagogical role of IAIA, and a burgeoning infrastructure of museums, galleries, and markets gave rise to a growing awareness of contemporary Native art as “an intricately entwined cultural statement based on traditional belief that reflect on and respond to contemporary situations.”6 Over the next two decades, Fonseca’s Coyote would appear in varied forms, among them a ballet dancer, an opera singer (Fonseca was a regular at the Santa Fe Opera in the late 1990s), a Pueblo Koshare (the Native jesters known for satire), a traditional Maidu dancer, a flute player, a cowboy, a “cigar store” Indian, and as HARRY FONSECA

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figure 106 Harry Fonseca, American Dream Machine, 2005. Acrylic, glitter, plastic coins on canvas, 72 × 60 in. © 2016 Harry Fonseca Collection, Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles, 2016.10.1.

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a gambler at a local casino. Painted at what should have been mid-career for the artist, American Dream Machine shows Coyote in his signature motorcycle jacket and jeans, jumping for joy in front of dual slot machines that shower him with gold coins in the form of plastic trinkets glued to the surface of the canvas. The figure, however, revels less in his newfound wealth and more in the irony of the western myth of equal opportunity and riches for all, including the more recent but uneven boom in Indian gaming. Fonseca’s Coyote is really celebrating the joy that his creator, the artist, found in the process of critique itself and in exposing the biases and contradictions upon which colonial myths depend. Ten years after American Dream Machine, when Fonseca lay dying of brain cancer in an Albuquerque hospital, Coyote was with him still. A few weeks before he died, he told Patsy Phillips, now the director of IAIA’s Museum of Contemporary Native Art, that “when I paint again, I will paint Coyote once more.”7 NOTES 1.  Simon Ortiz (Acoma), cited in Patsy Phillips, “Sundays with Harry: An Essay on a Contemporary Native Artist of Our Time,” Wicazo Sa Review 27, no. 1 (2012): 70. 2.  Hubert Howe Bancroft, Works, vol. 24 (San Francisco: History Co., 1890), 474. 3.  Phillips, “Sundays with Harry,” 66. 4.  Margaret L. Archuleta, “Coyote: A Myth in the Making. A Ten-Year Retrospect of Harry Fonseca,” master’s thesis, University of California, Berkeley, 14. 5.  Phillips, “Sundays with Harry,” 65. 6.  Archuleta, “Coyote,” 65. 7.  Phillips, “Sundays with Harry,” 70.

FOR FURTHER READING Archuleta, Margaret, et al. Harry Fonseca: The Art of Living. Indianapolis: Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, 2018. LaPena, Frank. “Coyote, A Myth in the Making. An Interview with Harry Fonseca.” News from Native California 1, November–December, 1897. Nottage, James. Into the Fray: The Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Fine Art. Indianapolis: Eiteljorg Museum and University of Washington Press, 2005.

HARRY FONSECA

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LIMNING THE LAND Topography and Temperament

turned to the native landscape with new interest in the early nineteenth century. Beginning in the 1820s, Thomas Cole and associated artists of the “Hudson River School” focused on wilderness subjects; over time, their interests extended from an initial focus on New York’s Hudson Valley to a broader (but still largely northeastern) range of subjects. That interest was subsequently enriched by the introduction of other motifs and new styles. By the 1860s, Albert Bierstadt and other painters, as well as photographers, had discovered the high peaks and broad expanses of the American West and made them familiar to an appreciative and widely dispersed audience. By the late 1800s, the novel impressionist style was adopted by many American artists in depictions of cultivated landscapes, urban street scenes, and Edenic fields and woodlands, handled with varying degrees of fidelity to the original French inspiration. In the twentieth century, new regional landscape and social subjects were popularized, from southern bayous to midwestern farmlands, from southwestern deserts to northwestern forests, and beyond. The “regionalist” artists associated with such subjects were complemented by others more concerned with imagination than geography, and whose images are infused with temperament more than topography or local color. These varied subjects and approaches constitute a lengthy and ongoing American pictorial tradition. ARTISTS IN THE UNITED STATES

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K ATHERINE MANTHORNE

ELIZA GREATOREX b. 1819, Manorhamilton, Ireland d. 1897, Paris, France

Pursuing Eliza Greatorex

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of nineteenth-century artists at strategic points in my career. Working with Barbara Novak on the exhibition Next to Nature: Landscape Paintings from the National Academy of Design, I became so intrigued by one of the figures I encountered then—painter, collector, and National Academy patron James Augustus Suydam—that I continued research on him that eventually culminated in the monograph and show Luminist Horizons: The Art and Collection of James A. Suydam. My dissertation on artist-travelers in Latin America led to my acquaintance with Louis Rémy Mignot, whom I continued to pursue post-PhD, eventually producing two publications and exhibitions.1 Scouring primary sources, I repeatedly encountered the name Eliza Greatorex (or more often “Mrs. Greatorex”). To satisfy my growing curiosity, I eventually succumbed to her call and began gathering references to her paintings and graphics, published reviews, and the occasional biographical tidbit. I was hooked. My engagement—or rather obsession— with this female artist extended far beyond the scholarly justifications I offered others to rationalize years of following in her footsteps across the United States and Europe. Her art was compelling, but her life story, as I slowly excavated it, captured my imagination. It possessed all the HAVE PERFORMED THE RESUSCITATION

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figure 107 Ferdinand Thomas Lee Boyle, Eliza Greatorex, 1869. Oil on canvas, 30 × 25 ¼ in. National Academy of Design, New York. Photo provided by Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons CC0 License.

requisite elements of a Hollywood movie: immigration, love, motherhood, global travel and adventure, personal loss, peaks of great success, crushing professional defeats, strong female friendships, and a lasting artistic legacy. Indignant that she was a major blind spot in American art history, and convinced that she and other women were not just “forgotten” but deliberately expunged from the record, I made Eliza Greatorex my personal crusade. 234

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figure 108 Eliza Greatorex, The Pond at Cernay La Ville, 1880. Etching, drypoint, and plate tone on laid paper, 4 ¼ × 6 ¹³/₁₆ in. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, John S. Phillips Collection, 1876.9.321.

Eliza who? Eliza Pratt Greatorex lived a life few of her female contemporaries could even imagine, doubling as a proper Victorian woman and precursor to feminists of the 1970s. She sang in the church choir; became expert at making butter; and, as a widow, raised four children, one of whom served in the Civil War. Simultaneously, she forged a career as a landscape painter and graphic artist, becoming the most famous woman artist of her day. As Eliza Pratt she left her native Ireland during the Great Famine at age twenty-eight and immigrated to New York. Unusually for a woman, she focused on landscape and became a recognized member of the Hudson River School. But as the post–Civil War building boom led to the demolition of the city’s old churches and landmarks, she transformed herself into a graphic artist to record them for posterity in her crowning achievement, the folio volume Old New York: From the Battery to Bloomingdale (1875). In a mark of esteem, in 1869 her (male) colleagues elected her the sole female member of their prestigious organization, the National Academy of Design, as documented in her diploma portrait. She was a pioneering woman artist in the American West, founded important art colonies in Colorado Springs and Cragsmoor, New York, and exhibited widely. She worked extensively in Germany, France, and Italy and lived for a year in North Africa, making her the first American woman painter to establish an international reputation, in advance of Mary Cassatt. She exhibited at the Paris Salon and was a founding figure in the etching revival, during which she created her widely circulating Pond at Cernay La Ville. She also published six books ELIZA GREATOREX

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and portfolios combining her images with explanatory texts. The name Greatorex is, however, absent from histories of American art. What is it that attracts us to an artist, that compels us to devote years or even decades to researching and writing them back to life? I have often pondered the likelihood that the scholar’s attraction to a given subject reveals as much about the scholar as it does about her subject. So, this meditation on my advocacy for Greatorex unavoidably mixes confession with cultural history. As New York City began to undergo massive growth and industrialization after the Civil War, many of its resident artists retreated into nature, searching for still-untouched wilderness or nostalgic pastorals. Greatorex, by contrast, confronted Boss Tweed’s relentless urban renewal, and tried to reckon with a changing city. Having begun her career as a landscape painter, she sought training in architectural rendering and captured New York homes and churches on paper just as the wrecking crews were razing them. Eighty of these images were gathered in her book Old New York, the most personally realized of her projects, born of outrage at the city’s blatant disregard for its past. The inscription on her image of North Dutch Church says it all: “Built in 1767. Demolished in 1875.” Outrage, however, is a complex emotion, encompassing a whirlwind of feelings, from personal loss to patriotism toward her newly adopted country, making the artist and her work all the more intriguing. Greatorex considered oil painting but one element in her repertoire, which embraced pen-and-ink drawing, heliotypes, books, portfolios, and plein air etching. This freed me to move away from the privileged status of the art object, to investigate her collective approach to art making entwined with her two artist-daughters and her sister; her involvement with the women’s movement; and her self-fashioning as a traveler-artist, often with children in tow. Tracking Greatorex’s career, I became acquainted with many accomplished women of whom I had previously been unaware: Elizabeth Ellet, author of the pioneering compendium Women Artists: In All Ages and Countries (1859); Sallie Gibbons, who owned and operated an art gallery on Madison Avenue in the 1870s and held a benefit exhibition for the women of the Centennial; and, most endearing of all, Mary Louise Booth, historian of New York, founding editor of Harper’s Bazaar, and one of the most well-connected women in the city. Pursuing Greatorex, one of the biggest revelations for me was that the American art world of the key years 1850 to 1880, a period I thought we scholars had mapped so well in terms of major artists, artworks, collectors, dealers, and critics, was only one dimension of a far more complex and interesting entity. Research insistently demonstrated that, embedded within that familiar scenario laid out in survey books, there were other constellations of movers and shakers who were equally engaged in making, exhibiting, critiquing, and selling art. For example, alongside the familiar roster of (largely male) players, there existed a bigenerational, multi-ethnic constellation of women artists who found alternative instructional opportunities, exhibition venues, studio spaces, ways to juggle careers and children, and voices to champion their work. I struggle to identify a conceptual model to describe this phenomenon. Is it geological, an art world of hitherto unexcavated strata? Is it a planetary model, perhaps like the orrery in 236

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figure 109 Eliza Greatorex, St. Paul’s Church, 1875. Heliotype on wove paper after a pen-and-ink drawing. The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Print Collection, The New York Public Library. The New York Public Library Digital Collections.

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Joseph Wright of Derby’s famous painting? And what do we do with this information? The worst that could happen to them, in my view, is that they are ghettoized as “Women Artists.” Should they all be inserted into the canon? Is the canon—and the related American art survey—infinitely expandable, amendable? These questions require further debate. Perhaps the very characteristics that attract us to these outlying artists are what bar them from admission into the canon. Greatorex’s curiosity, morality, and personal quest took precedence over considerations of public taste or the art market. These inclinations ran contrary to the modus operandi of most of her cohort, many of whom formulated and maintained a recognizable artistic brand. Greatorex was forever searching, constantly evolving, and consequently reinvented herself three times over—as landscapist, graphic chronicler of New York’s lost history, and plein air etcher—in as many decades. NOTES 1.  Katherine Manthorne and Mark DeSaussure Mitchell, Luminist Horizons: The Art and Collection of James A. Suydam (New York: George Braziller, 2006); Katherine Manthorne and John William Coffey, The Landscapes of Louis Remy Mignot: A Southern Painter Abroad (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996); Katherine Manthorne, Worlds Between: The Landscapes of Louis Rémy Mignot (Catskill, NY: Thomas Cole National Historic Site, 2012).

FOR FURTHER READING Manthorne, Katherine. Restless Enterprise: The Art and Life of Eliza Pratt Greatorex. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021.

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REBECCA BEDELL

ARTHUR WESLEY DOW b. 1857, Ipswich, Massachusetts d. 1922, New York, New York

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in surveys of the art of the United States, it is usually as the teacher of canonical figures such as Georgia O’Keeffe and Max Weber. Unquestionably, Dow was an important, influential teacher; in Weber’s words, he was “one of the greatest art educators this country was blessed with.”1 He transformed art education in the United States, introducing a method and a philosophy of instruction focused on formal values of line, color, and notan (light and dark patterning), whose influence is still felt today, more than one hundred years later. His pedagogical impact has been acknowledged and celebrated in a number of excellent exhibitions and articles. What I wish to argue for here is attention to Dow’s own artistic production as well as his complicated relationship to modernism. Dow was an artist of wide-ranging accomplishment. He was a tonalist landscape painter, a pictorialist photographer, and an innovative printmaker. O’Keeffe, who studied with Dow at New York’s Columbia Teachers College in the 1910s, recalled that “the man had one dominating idea: to fill a space in a beautiful way.”2 She credited his teaching with providing her a way beyond the dead end of her early academic training. Yet she added, about his work: “I was liking such snorting HEN ARTHUR DOW’S NAME APPEARS

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things that his seemed disgustingly tame to me.”3 Her dual assessment of Dow as transformational teacher and timidly conventional artist has continued to shape perceptions and presentations of Dow’s achievement. Writing in the wake of the 1913 Armory Show, O’Keeffe was applying to Dow’s art modernist standards of value that only intensified and deepened in the course of the twentieth century. Modernism valorized the abstract, the radically innovative, the boldly disruptive. It denigrated the traditional, the tenderly emotional, the feminine, and the popular. Art, according to modernist rhetoric, should be difficult and challenging, rattling bourgeois complacency. The muted delicacy and mysticism of Dow’s art, the allegiance he shows to representational landscape, and the gentle and gentlemanly demeanor of his life and art set him outside the avant-garde. Having received a solid academic training in the 1880s, both in the Boston area and at the Académie Julian in Paris, Dow worked throughout his career within the mainstream artistic currents of his time and place. His approach drew upon the French Barbizon style, the aesthetic movement, the Arts and Crafts movement, and, beginning in 1891, the aesthetics of Japanese prints. Shaped by these sources, Dow’s artistic production was and has been termed “conventional” and “conservative.” But we should push back against such devaluations. Dow sought “to fill space in a beautiful way,” and if we approach his art from this perspective, setting aside modernist terms of value, his achievements become more readily and richly accessible to us. Take Dow’s photographs. In histories of photography, Dow is generally cast in a minor supporting role as the teacher and mentor of the better-known Gertrude Käsebier, Alvin Langdon Coburn, and Clarence White. Yet, like them, he was an early proponent and practitioner of pictorialism, a lyrical photographer who created many images of quietly stunning beauty. He trained his camera primarily on the landscape of coastal Massachusetts, especially his native town of Ipswich: its fields, orchards, salt marshes, clam shacks, and colonial architecture. He preferred unpeopled scenes, stillness, and the moodily evocative blues of cyanotype photography. Dow’s compositional genius is evident in works such as Silhouetted Trees (ca. 1895–1910), in which the intricate details of a rural landscape are reduced to two broad masses. A dark area of midnight blue, fringed at its upper edge by the lacy forms of treetops, fills the lower three-quarters of the image. Above is the paler blue of a twilight sky with its punctum: a single point of brilliant light, perhaps Venus rising into the growing darkness. Such images give visual expression to Dow’s belief, in his book Composition (1899), that the role of the landscape artist is not to imitate nature, but to convey an emotion through the harmonious arrangement of light and dark masses, color, and line. The composition of Silhouetted Trees also calls to mind the Japanese prints that Dow so admired, in its reduction of the landscape to areas of flat color and even in its blue tonalities, which summon the first edition of Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (1830–33), printed in Prussian blue. Like his photographs, Dow’s paintings call for and reward attentive engagement. They echo the rural subject matter and contemplative moods of his cyanotypes. They embrace hushed emptiness and the softening atmospheric effects of twilight, dawn, and mist. As with 240

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figure 110 Arthur Wesley Dow, Silhouetted Trees, ca. 1895–1910. Photograph, cyanotype sheet, 6 ³/₈ × 8 ³/₈ in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Gift of Jessie H. Wilkinson–Jessie H. Wilkinson Fund, 1997.107. Photo: © 2021 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All rights reserved/Bridgeman Images.

Whistler’s nocturnes, which Dow revered, the hues are subdued, and the tonal range is narrow. In his oil-on-canvas The Mirror (1916), we gaze from an elevated perspective across an expanse of gray-white waters to a distant shoreline. A low, thick cloud cover filters a silvery light. Scattered small islands barely rise above the smooth surface of the sea. Just below their horizontal forms, vertical strokes of blue, lavender, and soft pink create shimmering reflections. In the luminous center of the picture, a single horizontal stroke of dark gray defines the surface of the water and stills the scene. In Dow’s colored woodcuts, the best-known of his works, his love for his home place, Ipswich, meets and melds with his love for Japanese prints. Rain in May (ca. 1907) represents the view from his Ipswich property across the marshes, past the low mound of Strawberry Hill to the distant horizon.4 The tidal river that Dow dubbed the Dragon meanders through the marsh. Its white reflective surface is represented by the bare paper of the print. As in many Japanese woodcuts, the horizon line is high and space is evoked through the vertical ARTHUR WESLEY DOW

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figure 111 Arthur Wesley Dow, The Mirror, 1916. Oil on canvas, 18 × 24 in. Courtesy of the Ipswich Museum, Ipswich, Massachusetts.

stacking of colored shapes. But the colors themselves are quintessentially Dow’s in their subtle harmonies. Varied greens—pale blue-green, tender yellow-green, dark gray-green, set off by the pink of blossoming apple trees—evoke the lushness of spring’s new growth. In printing the dove-gray sky, Dow took advantage of the texture of the laid paper to suggest vertical lines of falling rain. Through such works, Dow offers both nature and art as sources of spiritual solace. Dow’s achievements have been overlooked and diminished, in large part, because he has been placed on the margins of the modernist revolution. Yet Dow was revolutionary too. In his own quiet, individual way, he was brazenly, radically anti-hierarchical. While he stood with modernists in rejecting the strictures of academic teaching, especially the insistence on illusionism as the central aim of art, he also stood against the more chauvinistic and exclusionary attitudes of modernism that were taking hold in his era. His understanding of art embraced the widest range of media created across time and space. Dow made no distinction between fine and applied arts; decorative was never a term of derision for him. He accepted and promoted photography as a legitimate artistic form, and, crucially, he encouraged his students to find stimulation and guidance in art from around the globe: the 242

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figure 112 Arthur Wesley Dow, Rain in May, ca. 1907. Handprinted woodcut on laid paper, 6 ¹/₁₀ × 5 ⁹/₁₀ in. Courtesy of the Ipswich Museum, Ipswich, Massachusetts.

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Americas, Africa, Oceania, and, above all, Asia. He praised and studied the forms of beauty embodied in Peruvian textiles, Zuni pottery, Gothic sculpture, Persian rugs, Chinese Buddhist paintings, and Islamic architectural decoration. Dow boldly stated that many of the principles and practices that modernists claimed to be advancing for the first time, including abstraction, had been achieved by other cultures long before.5 He advocated the expression of emotion as the artist’s major goal, and—at odds with modernist rhetoric—he did not proscribe the articulation of gentle, tender feelings. He also supported and encouraged women artists, hundreds of them, who went on to establish careers as painters, photographers, printmakers, and ceramicists. A luminous maker of art, as well as an inspiring maker of artists, Arthur Dow matters not only for what he did for others but for what he did himself. NOTES 1.  Max Weber to Ethelwyn Putnam, 30 October 1958, Dow Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; quoted in Nancy E. Green and Jessie Poesch, Arthur Wesley Dow and American Arts & Crafts (New York: American Federation of Arts in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1999), 81. 2.  Katharine Kuh, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 190. 3.  O’Keeffe to Anita Pollitzer, October 1915; quoted in Roxana Robinson, Georgia O’Keeffe (New York: Harper & Row, 1989), 105. 4.  I am grateful to Stephanie Gaskins, Dow curator at the Ipswich Museum, for educating me in the geography of Ipswich. 5.  Arthur Wesley Dow, “Modernism in Art,” American Magazine of Art 8, no. 3 (1917): 113–116.

FOR FURTHER READING Fairbrother, Trevor. Ipswich Days: Arthur Wesley Dow and His Hometown. Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, 2007. Green, Nancy E., and Jessie Poesch. Arthur Wesley Dow and American Arts & Crafts. New York: American Federation of Arts in association with Harry N. Abrams, 1999. Green, Nancy E., et al. Arthur Wesley Dow and His Influence. New York: Spanierman Gallery, 1999. Moffat, Frederick C. Arthur Wesley Dow (1857–1922). Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Collection of Fine Arts, 1977.

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GRAHAM C. BOETTCHER

CARRIE LILLIAN HILL b. 1875, Vance, Alabama d. 1957, Birmingham, Alabama

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in the Montgomery Advertiser, the painter and occasional art critic John Kelly Fitzpatrick wrote, “If one of your Sunday morning delights is reading the Birmingham papers . . . you have probably run across a few columns about one of Alabama’s distinguished artists with perhaps a few cuts of her new paintings. This Birmingham prophet, who is not without honor in her own country, is Carrie L. Hill.”1 Carrie Hill was one of the foremost artists to live and work in Alabama during the first half of the twentieth century. Evidence of her stature is suggested by her solo exhibition of thirty-six paintings at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts in 1931, as well as the fact that her painting In the Foothills of the Pyrenees was among the first works to enter the Birmingham Museum of Art’s permanent collection in 1951. A charter member of the Birmingham Art Club, established in 1908, Hill emerged as one of the group’s most successful artists, exhibiting her work to acclaim locally, nationally, and even internationally, at the Paris Salon of 1928. Hill was already a well-established painter and art instructor when, in 1922, she undertook studies with the American impressionist George Elmer Browne at his school in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Later that N A 1932 ARTICLE

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figure 113 Carrie Hill portrait, 1923. Birmingham Public Library, Southern History Department, F325.A3 1923. Birmingham, Alabama, Public Library Archives.

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figure 114 Carrie Hill, In the Foothills of the Pyrenees, 1922. Oil on canvas, 38 ³/₈ × 38 ³/₈ in. Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama. Gift of the Birmingham Art Club, 1951.255. Photo: Sean Pathasema.

year, Hill joined Browne and other artists on a tour of France, Spain, and Morocco, the first of three trips abroad that she would make with Browne, which would provide the subject matter for some of her most acclaimed work. While foreign travel honed Hill’s artistic abilities, exposing her to an exotic array of subject matter, colors, and atmospheric conditions, she always returned to the landscape of her native Alabama. She once remarked, “The subject matters little. It is what the artist puts into it that counts. So, the field to me is limitless—there are possibilities everywhere—and everything appeals to me that is beautiful and artistic.”2 CARRIE LILLIAN HILL

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As happened to so many women artists of the twentieth century, period art writers inscribed Hill’s work into what the artist and writer Mira Schor has described as a system of “patrilineal legitimation,” whereby the work of a woman artist is validated not solely on its own merits but rather by virtue of an actual or perceived relationship to a male artist or “father.” In the case of Hill, critics frequently mentioned her teachers, which included Browne as well as the North Carolina painter Elliott Daingerfield, with whom she studied for only one summer. Hill’s work was sometimes praised for its resemblance to, or inspiration from, that of canonical artists (what Schor called “megafathers”) such as Corot or Cézanne.3 To be sure, Hill did admire Cézanne’s early work, but she eschewed his late forays into fractured planes, admired by the emerging Cubists. At least one review, by Birmingham News society editor Roberta Harris Winn, though mentioning Hill’s instructors, seemed to downplay their influence, stating that “Miss Hill’s achievements have been won almost singlehanded, for she has had little opportunity to study under masters. . . . But the history of art effort has demonstrated that genius often works wonders of itself, and this girl unquestionably has genius.”4 Success for Hill was measured, as it was for many other “regional” artists of the day, against the aspirations of succeeding in the New York art world. Remarking on Hill’s Alabama landscapes, Winn declared, “When Carrie Hill’s name becomes a familiar one in New York art circles, these little home studies will be cited as illustrating the unusual beauty of her native South.”5 Shortly thereafter, upon seeing one of Hill’s Alabama subjects in the window of a local business, an unnamed art “connoisseur” remarked that the artist “was entirely too modest in placing her price on the picture at only $150. Many pictures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York that cost $1,000 or more are not as good as this of the pines.”6 It’s difficult to determine whether Hill’s name became a familiar one in New York art circles. She exhibited several times in the city: first in February 1923, in a group exhibition of the pupils of George Elmer Browne held at Babcock Galleries, and in 1926 at the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the National Academy of Design. Unlike her Alabama-born contemporaries Anne Goldthwaite (1869–1944) and Lucille Douglass (1878–1935), Hill’s work never entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. While inclusion at such a prestigious institution was by no means the only measure of an artist’s success, then or now, it is interesting to note how the paths of these Alabama women differed, and speculate how that might have contributed to the relative renown they achieved in their lifetimes. Except for her summer sojourns to Europe and North Africa, Hill remained in Alabama her entire life, whereas Goldthwaite and Douglass left the South. Goldthwaite, the only Alabama-born artist to exhibit in the 1913 Armory Show, became part of an avant-garde circle of modern artists in Paris that included Matisse and Picasso. Douglass, on the other hand, spent much of her life in China and Southeast Asia, before returning to the United States, where she became known for her etchings of Angkor Wat and was in high demand as a public speaker. Although both Goldthwaite and Douglass maintained close ties to their home state, on the national stage they seemed to shed the mantle of being regarded as “Alabama artists,” whereas Hill continued to wear it, by all indications quite happily. 248

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figure 115 Carrie Hill, Old Mill at Mountain Brook, 1928. Oil on canvas, 32 ½ × 38 ¼ in. Collection of Art Fund Inc. at the Birmingham Museum of Art. Purchased with funds provided by Dr. Julius Linn, Mr. and Mrs. William C. Hulsey, Mrs. Elberta Reid, and Mr. and Mrs. Peter Worthen, AFI.73.2014. Photo: Sean Pathasema.

In 1923, Hill exhibited a Provincetown landscape titled The Hillside at the 36th Annual Exhibition of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago. A standout picture, it was selected for the cover of the December 8, 1923, edition of The Art News magazine, in which it was described as “An Inviting Work by an Alabama Woman Artist.”7 Hill’s mentor George Elmer Browne seemed to recognize the cachet that a New York pedigree afforded an artist. He once remarked to a visitor from Birmingham, “I am going to advise Miss Hill to leave Alabama and come to New York. . . . Then when you Alabamians see her pictures you will jump for them, and you won’t get them for a song either.”8 After Hill’s death in 1957, the “Birmingham prophet” continued to be honored “in her own country,” but for many years was largely forgotten beyond the borders of Alabama. Within days of her passing, the Alabama Art League established the Carrie Hill Memorial Award, and the Birmingham Public Library organized a retrospective of her work in 1978. In CARRIE LILLIAN HILL

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2004, the exhibition Art of the New South: Women Artists of Birmingham 1890–1950, organized by the Birmingham Historical Society, and the accompanying catalogue by Vicki Leigh Ingham, renewed interest in Hill. Her lateral descendants established a website to promote her legacy and field inquiries about the examples of her work that continue to surface around the country (see https://artistcarriehill.com). In 2013, the Mason-Scharfenstein Museum of Art at Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia, organized the first solo exhibition of Hill’s work in thirty-five years. In 2014, the Birmingham Museum of Art purchased Old Mill at Mountain Brook, perhaps the most iconic of Hill’s Alabama subjects. In 2019, Hill was included in Alabama Creates: 200 Years of Art and Artists, a substantial volume published on the occasion of Alabama’s bicentennial, featuring ninety-four of the state’s most significant and influential artists from throughout its history. More than sixty years after her death, Carrie Hill is beginning to receive national attention again. In 2021, her View of Segovia (1925) was exhibited at the Chrysler Museum of Art and the Milwaukee Art Museum in the exhibition Americans in Spain: Painting and Travel, 1820–1920. It was shown with a similar view by the well-known (male) American impressionist Ernest Lawson, a pairing that was applauded by art critic Judith H. Dobrzynski. Reviewing the exhibition in the Wall Street Journal, she praised such groupings, for “in bringing these artworks together—some of which are well-known—visitors gain new context and greater appreciation for them.”9 It is hoped that the exhibition, as well as this essay, will serve to pique further interest in the work of a painter who “absorbed the charm of situation, the glory of the atmosphere and transferred it all in colorful beauty to her canvas with the soul of an artist.”10 NOTES 1.  Kelly Fitzpatrick, “Paintings by Carrie L. Hill to Be Exhibited at Museum,” Montgomery Advertiser, November 7, 1931, 7. 2.  Dolly Dalrymple, “America Seen by Birmingham Painter as Drawing Room,” Birmingham News, December 27, 1925, quoted in Vicki Leigh Ingham, Art of the New South: Women Artists of Birmingham 1890–1950 (Birmingham, AL: Birmingham Historical Society, 2004), 68, 189 fn. 49. 3.  Mira Schor, “Patrilineage,” Art Journal 50, no. 2 (1991): 58–63. 4.  Roberta Harris Winn, “Coming Landscape Painter,” Birmingham News, April 22, 1911, quoted in Ingham, Art of the New South, 46, 189 fn. 13. 5.  Ibid. 6.  “Beautiful Landscape Painting,” Carrie Hill scrapbook, Courtesy of Henry Yarborough, quoted in Ingham, Art of the New South, 52–53, 189 fn. 26. 7.  “An Inviting Landscape by an Alabama Woman Artist,” Art News, December 8, 1923, 5, quoted in Ingham, Art of the New South, 56, 189 fn. 34. 8.  “Mrs. Sharp Sees Gainsborough Exhibit and Hears Pleasing Comments on Local Artists,” Carrie Hill scrapbook, courtesy of Henry Yarborough, quoted in Ingham, Art of the New South, 87, 190 fn. 71. 9.  Judith H. Dobrzynski, “Iberian Influence” (review of Americans in Spain: Painting and Travel, 1820–1920), Wall Street Journal, April 5, 2021, https://www.wsj.com/articles/americans-in-spain-painting-and-travel-1820– 1920-review-iberian-influence-11617447602. 10.  “Work of Alabama Artist Hangs in Little Gallery,” Birmingham News, May 2, 1923, 19.

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FOR FURTHER READING Ingham, Vicki L. Art of the New South: Women Artists of Birmingham 1890–1950. Birmingham, AL: Birmingham Historical Society, 2004. pp. 40–89. Katz, Lynn Barstis Williams. “Carrie Lillian Hill.” In Alabama Creates: 200 Years of Art and Artists, ed. Elliot A. Knight. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2019. pp. 81–82. Ruud, Brandon, and Corey Piper, et al. Americans in Spain: Painting and Travel, 1820–1920. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. p. 68.

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DAVID CATEFORIS

ALBERT BLOCH b. 1882, Saint Louis, Missouri d. 1961, Lawrence, Kansas

Albert Bloch: Art as an Elevated Calling

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to art historical fame is as the only American artist to exhibit with the Munich-based expressionist group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), led by Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. He deserves to be known for more, however, than his contributions to international modernism in the 1910s. His later work, more mature and original, expresses with deep conviction his conception of art as an elevated, spiritual calling, profoundly at odds with mainstream American culture’s secularism and materialism. Born and raised in Saint Louis, Bloch started his career as an illustrator, cartoonist, and caricaturist, principally for the weekly Saint Louis magazine The Mirror. His experience as a caricaturist inclined him to the stylization of the modernist art he encountered after moving to Munich in 1909. There he met Kandinsky and Marc, who invited him to participate in the Blue Rider shows of 1911 and 1912. His work was featured in other key exhibitions: the 1912 Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne (the prototype for the Armory Show) and the 1913 Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon in Berlin. From 1912 to 1917, he showed regularly at Herwarth Walden’s famous Berlin gallery, Der Sturm, once in a twoperson show with Paul Klee. He also had solo exhibitions in Munich, LBERT BLOCH’S MAIN CLAIM

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Frankfurt, Jena, Chicago, and Saint Louis, and a large retrospective at New York’s Daniel Gallery in November 1921 after his return to the United States. Like Alfred Maurer, Max Weber, Marsden Hartley, and other American modernist contemporaries, Bloch assimilated the aesthetic innovations of post-impressionism, fauvism, expressionism, and cubism. He painted a wide variety of subjects—a repertory he would continue for the rest of his life—from clowns and commedia dell’arte characters to portraits, still lifes, genre scenes, landscapes, cityscapes, mystical groups of robed and hooded figures, and Christian narratives. (Although of Jewish heritage, Bloch was not raised in that faith and instead embraced a personal form of Christianity.) Numerous German and American collectors acquired his paintings, and while he never attained the level of art historical recognition enjoyed by Maurer and other contemporaries, Bloch’s best efforts of the 1910s and early 1920s hold their own with those of his American peers and European colleagues like Heinrich Campendonk. There is strong demand for Bloch’s Munich-period paintings among today’s collectors. Exemplary of Bloch’s best European work is Winter. Probably painted in late 1918, it may celebrate the Armistice of November 11, 1918. In this whimsical mountain landscape, a man and a woman climb toward a cheery house, accompanied by several wild animals and hailed at the upper right by a living snowman. Overhead, a fantastic firmament glows with bright stars and planets. Figures and environment are integrated in a cubist-style continuum of fractured space and transparent planes of pink, orange, and yellow. The droll atmosphere and doll-like personages recall the works of Campendonk and Marc Chagall; the scattered spindly trees echo similar motifs by Klee. The carefree animals suggest a tribute to Bloch’s friend Marc, killed at the front in March 1916. Winter is easy to enjoy as an attractive pictorial essay in the language of late-1910s German modernism. If Bloch had never moved beyond this style, he would deserve no greater reputation than that of an American abroad competently riffing on the inventions of his European contemporaries. However, Bloch’s art developed substantially after his return to the United States—it deepened and matured, it became more distinctive and richly expressive. This later work merits more attention and appreciation. I see two main reasons for the obscurity of Bloch’s later work. One has to do with the course of his career after 1921, the other with the nature of the work itself. Following his Daniel Gallery show, Bloch retreated to his native Midwest and turned his back on the commercial art world, exhibiting infrequently and only by invitation, greatly reducing his art’s visibility. After teaching for a year at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts (1922–23), he accepted the position of head of the Department of Drawing and Painting at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where he taught art and art history for the next twenty-four years. (During his Kansas years, Bloch also wrote essays and hundreds of poems, and translated into English the German poetry of such authors as Goethe, Georg Trakl, and Karl Kraus.) He was content to continue drawing and painting without concern for exhibiting or selling, because he viewed art as an elevated calling that transcends the capitalist-driven materialism of modern American life. Art’s sole function, as he told his students, “has always been and ALBERT BLOCH

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figure 116 Albert Bloch, Winter, 1918. Oil on canvas, 50 ³/₈ × 36 ¼ in. Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas. Museum purchase, 1983.0022.

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must always remain the deepening of the human perception and consciousness . . . to give to the human race some sense of the dependence of our life here on earth, upon a state of being higher than our present one: to bring to us a profounder feeling of our inextricable union with the Infinite.”1 As to the nature of Bloch’s later work: simply put, it is not always easy to like. Ranging in mood from the tragic to the ecstatic, with imagery that can be dark, heavy, awkward, and grotesque, the later pictures are never ingratiating and often difficult. But their emotional intensity is profound and unforgettable. I know of nothing like them in the history of American art. Working in relative isolation in Lawrence, heedless of the fashionable trends in American art, by the mid-1930s Bloch developed a highly personal style of great expressive force in ink drawing, watercolor, and oil painting. His study of older art and his observation of nature nourished his creativity, but he did not seek to reproduce what he saw; he worked from memory and imagination, enriched by visual discoveries made in the process of painting. Even his depictions of such everyday subjects as flowers, houses, and landscapes appear transformed by the artist’s fantasy—elevated from the mundane to the extraordinary. Like Marc and Kandinsky, who aspired to transcend materialism and express spiritual values in their art, Bloch often described his paintings in spiritual terms. In a 1948 letter, he emphasized how reality appeared dematerialized and transfigured in his paintings: “I paint still lifes, landscapes, and compositions with figures, just like everyone else, only with me the result is inescapably a complete spiritualization of the object. . . . A total fusion of matter with spirit, blurring the remnants of the tangible object.”2 Bloch generated this quality using a palette of earth colors and cold blues overlaid with white to produce shimmering effects suggestive of spiritual emanations. Among Bloch’s later paintings, I find most compelling his visionary landscapes, richly complex compositions of imaginary forests, meadows, and mountainous terrains, sometimes populated by robed and hooded figures. These were a revelation to me when I first saw them in the mid-1990s in the attic studio of his Lawrence home in the company of his widow, Anna Francis Bloch. Among the paintings we relished together is Passing Train, one of Bloch’s most haunting visions. In it, an embracing couple in brown stand with their backs turned to the viewer at the edge of a moonlit, rocky, labyrinthine landscape filled with glowing plants and twisting trees. The lovers listen to a distant train, visually suggested by a series of horizontal shapes in the background. Across from a narrow stream flowing below the couple rise the transparent figures of a draped woman and infant, suggestive of the Madonna and Child. Down and to the right sits the ghostly figure of a round-headed, hollow-eyed man cradling a cluster of flowers. According to Anna Bloch, the painting drew on memories of summer nights she and Albert spent in Falls Village, Connecticut, where the train called out as it crossed the valley on the other side of the Housatonic River. Bloch began this picture following a severe heart attack that forced his retirement from the University of Kansas; we may understand it as an elegy for transitory earthly pleasures, as fleeting as a passing train. In this reading, the ghostly personage seated by the stream becomes a figure of the ailing artist holding his own memorial bouquet while contemplating his approaching death. In this ALBERT BLOCH

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figure 117 Albert Bloch, Passing Train, 1947–48. Oil on canvas, 36 × 40 in. Albert Bloch Foundation. Photo: Aaron Paden.

context, the mother and child may represent the Christian hope of resurrection and eternal life, in which Bloch placed great faith. Bloch ultimately considered all of his art religious in the sense of being “filled with the consciousness of [the] mystic marriage of the spiritual and the sensuous in man, of the whole man with his environment and the whole environment with the spirit that is God.”3 This attitude links him to other American artists, such as Mark Tobey, Agnes Pelton, Joseph Cornell, and Mark Rothko, each of whom expressed religious belief in a highly personal style. Erika Doss calls them “spiritual moderns.” Albert Bloch deserves recognition in their company. NOTES 1.  Albert Bloch, “Lecture No. 1: General Introduction,” typescript lecture notes for a course in the history of art taught at the University of Kansas, 1923–24, n.p. Copy in the Albert Bloch Archives, Max Kade Center for German-American Studies, The University of Kansas.

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2.  Albert Bloch, letter to Sidonie Nádherný von Borutin, June 10, 1948. Copy in the Albert Bloch Archives, Max Kade Center for German-American Studies, The University of Kansas. 3.  Albert Bloch as recorded by Anna Bloch immediately after a conversation with him, quoted in Richard C. Green, “Albert Bloch: An Overview of His Artistic Career,” in Frank Baron, Helmut Arntzen, and David Cateforis, eds., Albert Bloch: Artistic and Literary Perspectives (Munich: Prestel-Verlag in association with Max Kade Center for German-American Studies, University of Kansas, 1997), 21.

FOR FURTHER READING Adams, Henry, Margaret C. Conrads, and Annegret Hoberg, eds. Albert Bloch: The American Blue Rider. Munich: Prestel-Verlag in association with Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art and Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, 1997. Baron, Frank, Helmut Arntzen, and David Cateforis, eds. Albert Bloch: Artistic and Literary Perspectives. Munich: Prestel-Verlag in association with Max Kade Center for German-American Studies, University of Kansas, 1997. Cateforis, David. Albert Bloch: Themes and Variations: Paintings and Watercolors from the Albert Bloch Foundation. Lawrence, KS: Lawrence Arts Center, 2015.

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JASON WEEMS

MARVIN CONE b. 1891, Cedar Rapids, Iowa d. 1965, Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Marvin Cone: Regionalism and (as) Disappearance

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about the Iowan artist Marvin Cone’s landscape Old Quarry—Stone City. Completed in 1936, the sensitively modeled oil painting depicts a rolling topography of midwestern prairie, quarry, and hamlet in the languorous hues of midsummer. Pictured from a hillside perch, Cone’s rendition is complex and multifaceted. At first glance, the canvas seems to offer up a singularity of color and contour—its composition both formally and thematically complete, encapsulated, and self-sustaining. A longer gaze, however, reveals a different, more experiential set of possibilities. Beginning in the lower left corner, the curving line of fenceposts and a footpath draw the viewer into the dale. The route links up with the white limestone road on the valley floor, which flows horizontally across the middle of the canvas before turning sharply at the rightmost edge and climbing to meet the sliver of blue horizon in the upper left. Something like a gentle invitation, this pathway draws from the painting a different sensibility—that of journey, engagement, and narration. To midwestern eyes, these oscillations between timelessness and specificity, idealization and authenticity, dreamscape and reality evoke a familiar psychology of real and imagined place-ties. For a broader viewership, the painting encapsulates the romantic, at times self-isolating OMETHING FEELS DEEPLY FAMILIAR

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figure 118 Marvin Cone, Old Quarry—Stone City, 1936. Oil on canvas, 20 × 36 in. Coe College Permanent Art Collection, 2004.03. Photo by Mark Tade, 2006. © Estate of Marvin Cone.

character of a land and people at the center of, yet also remote from, the realities of modern American life. There is, of course, another probable reason for the painting’s familiarity: its resemblance to a similar scene composed six years earlier by the now famous regionalist artist Grant Wood. Wood’s infinitely better known and more often reproduced work, titled Stone City, Iowa (1930, Joslyn Museum), seems nearly identical in form and content. Wood utilizes the same hilltop perch, the same meandering pathways, the same swelling hillsides and rounded tree forms. Striking to be sure, these resemblances are not surprising. Cone and Wood were longtime comrades and artistic collaborators. Born in the same year and less than fifty miles apart, the two lifelong Iowans attended public schools together in Cedar Rapids, studied art together in Chicago and Europe, and cooperated in the establishment of a regional arts culture in eastern Iowa. Wood almost certainly introduced Cone to the Stone City countryside. Located near the farm where Wood was born, the town served as the location for the Stone City Colony and Art School, held in the summers of 1932 and 1933. Wood directed the colony, while Cone taught landscape painting and figure drawing. Indeed, Cone’s first oil sketch for Old Quarry dates to 1933. It is easy to imagine the two artists trudging together up the hillside from the hamlet, Wood leading the way, to reach the origin point for both works. From that hillside, however, each artist struck a different path. Already nationally known, largely for the surprise success of his 1930 farmer-daughter portrait American Gothic, the more extroverted Wood emerged alongside fellow midwesterners Thomas Hart Benton and John Steuart Curry as a national champion for American regionalism. Featured in a Time MARVIN CONE

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magazine feature on that movement in 1934, he further established himself as its intellectual linchpin via his (ghostwritten) 1935 regionalist manifesto, Revolt against the City. Yet Cone was there as well. Described by friends (including Wood) as introspective and familyoriented, Cone remained in mutual orbit with Wood: spending time with Curry and Benton, summering in Stone City with influential regionalist author Paul Engle, organizing and participating in regional(ist) events and exhibitions, and taking an art professorship at Coe College in Cedar Rapids in 1934. (Wood accepted a similar position at the University of Iowa, Iowa City, only a year later.) There are many reasons why Wood achieved prominence (and notoriety) while Cone did not. Some are undoubtedly based in personality, with Wood pushing both his art and himself into debates about national art and culture while Cone was reticent to do so. Deeper still, the two friends seemed to want different things for themselves from their art. Wood’s actions and attitudes demonstrate a desire to use art as a means to project his ideas (and himself) into public discourse. In spite of his own modesty, Wood pursued the idea of the artist as a public figure. To Cone, by contrast, the satisfaction of art making was introverted, deeply interior. As described by Paul Engle, Cone’s commitment remained steadfastly tied to the “ideal idea” of art; he “never compromised, never cared about being fashionable, never pursued that death trap of artists: the commercial gallery. . . . [H]e was modest beyond any artist I have ever known.”1 Of course, personality is not all of it. Despite similarities in form and content, Cone’s and Wood’s oeuvres overlapped and diverged in equal measure to their character. All diligent comparisons between their works show this. What they shared in training and compositional proclivities was enlivened by their individualized inclinations. It was never the case that Cone simply followed Wood by aping the more famous artist’s techniques after the fact. With regard to landscape painting, for example, both embraced the modeling of earthen forms in remarkably voluminous and even sumptuous terms. Yet where Wood pushed forward to animate his hillsides with an almost sexual anthropomorphism, Cone held back. What’s more, evidence suggests that Wood owes something of his signature style of swelling topography and curvaceous pathways to Cone, whose 1925 painting Villages—Southern France No. 1 (Cedar Rapids Museum of Art) not only contains those elements, but antedates their appearance in any of Wood’s art. For Cone as much as Wood, the style became a signature compositional device, as seen, for example, in his River Farm (1938, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art). In other cases, such as his multiple cloud paintings from the early 1930s, Cone composes in a manner different from his friend. In Prelude (1931), for example, he eschewed the undulating earthiness of both his and Wood’s Stone City views in favor of a more dramatic and impressionist attention to the booming verticality of a rolling thunderhead. The point here is not to balance ledger books of artistic debt and in that way diminish Wood’s artistic and cultural achievements. Wood has certainly earned his reputation as an innovator and provocateur. Rather, the necessity is to think more fully and critically about

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figure 119 Marvin Cone, Prelude, 1931. Oil on canvas, 30 × 36 in. Collection of the Cedar Rapids Community School District, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. © Estate of Marvin Cone.

the disappearance of Cone, whose efforts influenced what we now conventionalize as regionalism, as a style and movement. That we must do so is perhaps especially ironic, for the regionalism that Wood and Cone conceived was, by intent and practice, one of sustained and deliberate collaboration. Such sense of art as community is everywhere evident in Wood’s regionalist efforts: his collaborations with Benton and Curry, his effort to construct a midwestern school of art in the Stone City Colony and elsewhere, and finally his championing of shared, collaborative regionalist thinking in Revolt against the City. To look anew at Cone’s work is not only to discover an innovative artist in his own right, but also to understand better and more fully the depth of collaborative intention underwriting one of American art’s signature movements. Cone’s work (and that of others like him) is richer than we’ve recognized—both on its own and especially in its rightful collaborative engagement with Wood and others. If we fail to do this, the disappearance of Cone becomes nothing less

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figure 120 Marvin Cone, Inner Light, 1950. Oil on canvas, 17 ⁷/₈ × 28 ¹/₈ in. Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Museum purchase in memory of Arthur Poe, 51.1. © Estate of Marvin Cone.

than the disappearance of regionalism as a whole—or, at the very least, acceptance of its impoverished (mis)characterization. Coda: On the whole, art history has not been effective in its understanding of artistic collaboration. It remains overly wedded to the myth of artistic creativity as a solipsistic enterprise. A fuller embrace in our scholarship of overlapping, interdependent practices such as those of Cone and Wood may be tremendously revealing, while also encouraging productive speculation. On the latter point, it is worth noting that Cone outlived Wood by a little over twenty years. As such, he not only shaped regionalism in its 1930s heyday, but also lived through and responded to the movement’s formal and cultural eclipse, which had already begun prior to Wood’s death in 1942 but was completed during the years immediately thereafter. Unlike more dogmatic regionalists such as Curry and Benton, Cone demonstrated remarkable adaptability in these years, shifting toward a geometric abstract expressionist style that is remarkably poised and dynamic. Given the depths of their collaboration, one wonders if Wood might have followed suit. NOTES 1.  Paul Engle, “Foreword,” in Joseph Czestochowski, Marvin Cone: An American Tradition (New York: Dutton, 1985).

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FOR FURTHER READING Brown, Hazel E. Grant Wood and Marvin Cone: Artists of An Era. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1972. Czestochowski, Joseph. Marvin Cone: An American Tradition. New York: Dutton, 1985. . Marvin Cone and Grant Wood: An American Tradition. Cedar Rapids, IA: Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, 1990. . Marvin Cone: Art as Self Portrait. Cedar Rapids, IA: Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, 1990.

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BETSY FAHLMAN

EDITH HAMLIN b. 1902, Oakland, California d. 1992, San Francisco, California

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Women Painters of the American West, 1890–1945, an exhibition organized by the Autry Museum of Western Heritage, opened in Los Angeles. A landmark show, it presented many talented artists who had worked in this vast region— but who were not named Georgia O’Keeffe. The accompanying publication inspired extensive new scholarship on artists whose work had been marginalized in favor of their male contemporaries. Edith Hamlin’s handsome painting Canyon of Flame and Storm (1940, private collection), included in that show, was my first introduction to her work. Artists like Hamlin have too easily dropped off the art historical radar simply because of their gender. The canon has long been dominated by white men whose authority was grounded in masculinist conceptions of “genius.” For them, women did not merit the close analysis of the male scholarly gaze and were quickly dismissed following a brief “male glance.”1 But gender accounts for only part of Hamlin’s vanishing, and she represents a telling case study of the many ways women are written out of the historical record. As a California native who spent most of her career in the West, she would not have come to the notice of eastern-centric art historians. N 1995, INDEPENDENT SPIRITS:

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Her second marriage, in 1937, was to Maynard Dixon (1875–1946) a well-established artist noted for his striking portrayals of the landscapes and Native peoples of the American West. Dixon, then aged sixty-five, was nearly three decades older than Hamlin. Two-artist households have often presented vexed issues. A writer for the Oakland Tribune declared: “The Dixons have solved the ‘career’ problem between married artists in that they are as capable of collaborating on mural work as they are of keeping intact their individual work and viewpoints.”2 Hamlin concurred, feeling that “there was no disadvantage in us both being artists,”3 and claimed that the couple felt no “professional competition.”4 But the matter was not so simply parsed, and it was an issue typically raised only for women. For much of their marriage, Dixon suffered from the increasingly debilitating effects of asthma and emphysema, which necessitated Hamlin’s assumption of caretaker duties. During the last year and a half of his life, he was tethered to an oxygen tank, and at the end he was confined to a wheelchair. When she had time to paint, she focused on small landscapes, executed on the trips they took together in Arizona and Utah, where they maintained residences after leaving California. As his widow, she became the custodian of his estate, which entailed many time-consuming tasks, including assisting with exhibitions and publications and serving as a convenient archive for scholars eager to interview her about Dixon. She saw to it that his work continued to enter public collections, either by sale or by donation, overseeing the expansion of his reputation even as her own diminished. Hamlin regarded her time with Dixon as the happiest period of her life. When they became involved in the 1930s, each had recently been divorced, which made them both grateful that they had “washed up on the same beach,”5 as Hamlin put it. Dixon was depressed at the end of his fifteen-year marriage to Dorothea Lange, and he responded to Hamlin’s warmth and vivacious personality. She came into his life at just the right time, as Dixon’s son Daniel recalled: “She just sort of appeared, like leaves on a tree in the spring.”6 It was Hamlin who “pulled him through periods of physical and psychological devastation.”7 Hamlin celebrated their connection in a portrait she painted in 1940, three years after they married. The aged Dixon posed in the austere Arizona desert they both treasured. The warm glow in the background, beyond the purple mountains, suggests the warmth of their relationship. His pose is relaxed, and he holds a cigarette in his slender, expressive left hand, as he looks directly at Hamlin. One senses the tall, lean, lanky frame that his friends found so distinctive when they saw him walking on the city streets during his San Francisco years. Portrayed at rest, he appears weary after a long, successful career, but happy in his late marriage. Six years later, he would be dead. In early December 1946, unaware that Maynard Dixon had died just a few weeks before, Santa Fe Railway officials wrote inquiring if he might be interested in painting a pair of murals for their newly remodeled Chicago ticket office. It was a splendid space, with two big walls for the murals, and large windows on the other two sides allowed the space to be filled with light. Edith Hamlin, who had collaborated with her husband on several projects, offered to do them herself. She was an experienced muralist who had completed three California EDITH HAMLIN

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figure 121 Edith Hamlin, Maynard Dixon, Painter of the Desert, 1940. Oil on canvas, 25 × 30 in. Oakland Museum of California. Gift of the artist.

New Deal commissions, including paintings for the Coit Tower (1934) and Mission High School (1936), both in San Francisco, and for the post office in Tracy (1938). This was an exceptional professional opportunity for Hamlin. The Santa Fe Railway had formed the first corporate art collection in America, and a surprising number of women received its patronage. Partnering with the Fred Harvey Company, the railroad provided travelers with safe adventures via first-class transportation, comfortable lodging, and good food, aiming to immerse visitors in an “authentic” experience of the American West—with an emphasis on promoting the Southwest. Hamlin chose subjects from Arizona and New Mexico, which suited her patron, as these were featured destinations for the railroad’s customers. She selected scenes that were personally important to her as well, and executed two large, handsome murals: The Grand Canyon and The Eagle Dance at Taos, both completed in 1947. When asked what her fee was, she responded, “Oh, I think it’s worth ten thousand dollars.” The architect voiced no objection, and Hamlin admitted, “I think I could have asked more!” Company officials agreed to the 266

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figure 122 Edith Hamlin, The Grand Canyon, 1947. Wall mural, 9 × 28 ft. Courtesy of BNSF Railway.

sum but gave her only two months to complete the work; she assured them that “with photographic material at hand, and Taos and the Canyon in my mind, I’ll get on the job. And I expect to enjoy that.”8 She made the deadline, recalling later that the commission “helped tide me over during that sad time in my life.” Hamlin had visited the Grand Canyon many times, and her mural celebrating Arizona’s signature landscape feature is a stunning composition that captures the subject’s magnificent scale and rich color palette. The rainbow in the upper right corner conveys an element of hope for her in the aftermath of her husband’s death. Hamlin had first visited Taos in 1932, arriving in early summer and staying until early fall. By the time she left, she realized, “I had lost my heart to New Mexico.” With Dixon, she subsequently enjoyed several visits to Taos. Hamlin was particularly interested in the Native ceremonies. “We had wonderful parties,” she later recalled, “because our Indian guests performed Eagle dances and Buffalo dances, right in our living room.” The Eagle Dance, a healing ceremony that is not seasonal, is performed at multiple pueblos. In Hamlin’s mural, chanters and drummers on the left side, and two women and a child on the other, flank the two male dancers who face each other in the center. They make sweeping motions with their wings. The ancient Taos Pueblo fills the background of the painting. Hamlin used the funds she earned from this project to build a studio in Mount Carmel, Utah, the property she and Dixon had purchased in 1939 and where they spent summers. The even lighting and thirty-foot-long walls were perfect for murals. They had planned to put up a studio earlier, but Dixon’s health problems, exacerbated by the elevation of fifty-three hundred feet, meant that they shared the house only between 1940 and 1945. In 1949, following the Santa Fe Railway murals, Hamlin received one more important commission. For the dining room of the Arizona Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix, she portrayed a Navajo legend in The Turquoise Goddess and the Warrior Twins. This huge mural—it measures nine by twenty-eight feet—was a companion piece to Dixon’s The Legend of Sun and Earth (1929) in the same room. EDITH HAMLIN

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figure 123 Edith Hamlin, The Eagle Dance at Taos, 1947. Wall mural, 9 ft. 4 in. × 17 ft. 5 in. Courtesy of BNSF Railway.

An artist whose work “breathes of the desert,” Hamlin created an oeuvre that encompassed paintings, murals, large wall hangings, prints, and decorative screens, for which she received positive reviews during the early part of her career.9 But her output remained surprisingly small, and today few of her works are in public collections. When Hamlin had time to focus, she produced stunning paintings that deserve to be better known, and her story gives important texture to the rich chronicle of the American West. NOTES 1.  Lily Loofbourow, “The Male Glance,” Virginia Quarterly Review 94, no. 1 (2018): 36–47. 2.  H. L. Dungan, “Dixon Studio in S.F. to Be Closed,” Oakland Tribune, October 8, 1939. 3.  Moira Roth, ed., Connecting Conversations: Interviews with 28 Bay Area Artists (Oakland, CA: Eucalyptus Press, Mills College, 1988), 75. 4.  “Maynard Dixon, Artist of the West: As Remembered by Edith Hamlin,” California Historical Quarterly 53 (Winter 1974): 373. 5.  Donald J. Hagerty, “Edith Hamlin: A California Artist,” interview conducted for the American Studies Program, University of California, Davis, November 29, 1979–March 4, 1980, Archives of American Art, Microfilm reel 2813. Unless otherwise noted, all other Hamlin quotes are from this source. 6.  Daniel Dixon, quoted in The Thunderbird Remembered: Maynard Dixon, the Man and the Artist (Seattle: University of Washington Press in association with Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum, Los Angeles, 1994), 64.

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7.  Kevin Starr, “Painterly Poet, Poetic Painter: The Dual Art of Maynard Dixon,” California Historical Quarterly 56 (Winter 1977–1978): 295–296. 8.  Edith Hamlin Dixon to A. A. Dailey, January 27, 1947, Archives BNSF Railway, Fort Worth, Texas. 9.  San Diego Sun, May 1929, quoted in California Art Research Archive (CARA), Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley, https://bancroftlibrarycara.files.wordpress.com/2014/03/cara_v16_hamlin.pdf.

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LARA KUYKENDALL

CONSTANCE COLEMAN RICHARDSON b. 1905, Berlin, Germany; to United States as a young child d. 2002, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Constance Coleman Richardson: “How wonderful the world is if you really look at it . . .”

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of Constance Coleman Richardson at the Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA). There hangs Streetlight (1930), a quotidian painting that depicts a woman and girl walking on a sidewalk in a residential neighborhood. There are no cars, and the entire scene is relatively dark but for the glow of the mostly hidden streetlight to which the title refers. The cool blue-green palette, along with the stabilizing geometry of the vertical tree trunks and the horizontal street, provides a sense of stillness, which is counterbalanced by the curved pathway in the foreground and the various flurries of leaves and shrubbery. When Streetlight appeared in Indianapolis’s John Herron Art Institute’s annual exhibition of Hoosier artists in 1931, it earned the then twenty-six-year-old Richardson some of her first acclaim. The Indianapolis Star praised the painting’s tonal palette and compositional structure and likened its overall effect to the rhythms and “exquisite harmonies in music.” Streetlight was “modern,” the Star explained, because of its “simplification and patterned design,” and the painting won an honorable mention award in the exhibition.1 Although Streetlight entered the collection of the IMA in 1935 and occasionally appeared in museum exhibitions around the country in the decades that followed, its relative fame surged when it was included FIRST ENCOUNTERED THE WORK

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figure 124 Constance Coleman Richardson, Streetlight, 1930. Oil on canvas, 28 × 36 in. Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields. Gift of Mrs. James W. Fesler. Photo © Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields/Bridgeman Images.

in the 1987 inaugural exhibition of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. The curators described Richardson as a painter who was “unheralded today” and claimed Streetlight as one of their show’s “discoveries.”2 It appeared on the cover of the exhibition catalogue, in reviews of the show in the New York Times and other newspapers and magazines, and on the CBS news program Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt. Consequently, since 1987, to those who know Richardson at all, her earliest painting has become her signature work of art. It is easy to see why Streetlight met with so much interest in the late twentieth century. Recent museum labels have described the painting as a very pleasant genre scene, one that is “representative of middle-class America during the 1930s,” that “breathes the essence of a summer evening,” and that is imbued with “the gentle nocturnal sounds of crickets and cicadas.” However, layered on top of that are some eerie and unsettling qualities, too; the man lurking in the darkness, smoking, and the lone toddler across the street contribute to a sense of unease. The toddler’s raised arms tug at her hair, and she casts a shadow that is outsized and menacing, a visual signifier of a tense family drama. Streetlight often hangs in CONSTANCE COLEMAN RICHARDSON

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the IMA’s American Scene gallery, next to Edward Hopper’s Hotel Lobby (1943). This curatorial choice is apt, as the enticingly awkward but potentially disturbing atmosphere swirling around the four characters of Richardson’s scene resembles the sorts of prosaic but melancholy human dramas for which Hopper is best known. With its tantalizing mixture of the mundane and the disconcerting, Streetlight fits neatly into a history of American modernist realism and has benefited from the vogue for Hopper’s style. When I first began researching Richardson, I hoped to find dozens of similarly intriguing Depression-era narrative scenes tucked away in museums. I thought my task would be to append her to Hopper’s “school” and resurrect the career of a neglected American Scene painter. However, I quickly found that in both style and subject matter, Streetlight is an anomaly within Richardson’s career. If Streetlight were all we knew by Richardson, then we would not know her at all. In the exhibition catalogue for Richardson’s 1970 retrospective at New York’s Kennedy Galleries, art historian Mahonri Sharp Young wrote that Streetlight represents one of the “early styles which every artist goes through to arrive at individuality.”3 That dismissive description suits the painting’s transitional position in Richardson’s biography, too, as Streetlight was inspired by the view from a window in her parents’ Indianapolis home, where she lived after graduating from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. With its three female family members cloistered together between two trees and connected by the toddler’s shadow, Streetlight invokes the life cycle of a girl—from ornery toddler to inquisitive adolescent to motherhood. This traditional path may have been on the artist’s mind that year as she made choices about her future. Shortly after painting Streetlight, she married art historian Edgar P. “Ted” Richardson and moved to Detroit, where he joined the staff of the Detroit Institute of Arts, and she embarked on a long painting career. Their marriage lasted until his death in 1985 and they had no children. After Richardson settled into her mature style, she altered her artistic course. As Young put it, “essentially, she is a landscape painter,” but she also painted the occasional still life, portrait, or architectural scene. Throughout her career, Richardson worked in a manner that was both representational and painterly. She painted the landscapes she visited over the course of approximately four decades, using a deliberate and painstaking process that began with sketches and photographs outdoors. She made her own gesso, mixed her own oil paints, and applied multiple layers of varnish to stretched canvas, linen-covered panels, and Masonite in her studio. I have identified over a hundred paintings, including more than twenty in museum collections, though most are unlocated. Although Richardson enjoyed both commercial and critical acclaim, she never fit into the mid-century avant-garde and has subsequently received very little scholarly notice. Richardson’s art was built on a foundation of close and sustained observation of her surroundings, whether she found herself in urban or rural settings near her home in Detroit or while traveling in such places as Minnesota, Wyoming, Vermont, or even Guatemala. As she explained in the brochure for her first one-person show at Macbeth Gallery in 1944, “It interests me to look at nature, which I find much more remarkable than anything anyone can 272

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figure 125 Constance Coleman Richardson, The Ornithologist, 1945. Oil on panel, 10 × 14 in. Detroit Institute of Arts. Gift of the Audubon Society of Detroit, 46.230. Photo © Detroit Institute of Arts/Bridgeman Images.

make up; and to try to say something about light and space and air and how wonderful the world is if you really look at it; and to say it with clarity, serenity and objectivity.” The Ornithologist (1945) is a typical Richardson landscape, with its muted palette and expansive view of a peaceful valley. The beauty of the terrain is rather subtle, not exaggerated for sublime impact. At ten by fourteen inches, the small size of the work encourages the viewer to move in close to see the many layers of gray, blue, and green, the touches of white, and the slow, deliberate painterliness that conveys the texture of clouds, trees, grass, and rocks. A tiny birdwatcher in the foreground models Richardson’s way of taking in nature, in its simplicity and its complexities, and invites viewers to look similarly at her paintings. Richardson’s mature style contrasts dramatically with the earlier Streetlight. Whereas Streetlight is dark and still, and relies on electric light to illuminate the human drama, later works provide bright, airy depictions of a point where nature meets civilization, as in her view of the docks at the port of Duluth. The human presence is evident from the industrial architecture and billowing smoke from activity in the port, but it is held in check by the expansive sky at the top of the panel and the foreground of trees, rocks, and grass. Gone is Streetlight’s emphasis on geometry and narrative mystery. It has been replaced by Richardson’s attention to atmosphere, light, and the calm stillness of the world as she perceived it. CONSTANCE COLEMAN RICHARDSON

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The fact that Richardson has been misrepresented by her earliest extant painting and otherwise relatively forgotten is unfortunate, as she enjoyed many successes during her long career. She exhibited her work in solo and group shows all over the country, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the de Young Museum. She sold paintings to collectors and museums, and garnered positive attention from members of the art world in New York and elsewhere. She was represented by the Macbeth Gallery in New York City from 1943 until the gallery closed its exhibition space in 1953. Richardson’s contemporaries in Macbeth’s stable of artists included Andrew Wyeth and Ogden Pleissner, and like them she investigated realism’s potential long after abstraction and conceptualism had become more popular. Richardson deserves new attention as an artist who continued the American traditions of realism and landscape painting in the mid-twentieth century. NOTES 1.  Lucille E. Morehouse, “Tonal Effects Are Distinctive,” Indianapolis Star, March 29, 1931, 28. 2.  Eleanor Tufts, American Women Artists, 1830–1930 (Washington, DC: International Exhibitions Foundation for the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1987), cat. 78. 3.  Mahonri Sharp Young, Constance Richardson (New York: Kennedy Galleries, 1970), n.p.

FOR FURTHER READING Newton, Judith Vale, and Carol Ann Weiss. Skirting the Issue: Stories of Indiana’s Historical Women Artists. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2004. Tufts, Eleanor. American Women Artists, 1830–1930. Washington, DC: International Exhibitions Foundation for the National Museum of Women in the Arts, 1987. Young, Mahonri Sharp. Constance Richardson. New York: Kennedy Galleries, 1970.

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JASON LAFOUNTAIN

BOB ROSS b. 1942, Daytona Beach, Florida d. 1995, Orlando, Florida

Bob Ross: The Good Artist

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fit for this book. While he is certainly not a canonical artist, he is considerably more famous than most of the other artists included here. Indeed, he’s more famous than most canonical American artists. Many people who have never studied art history will have heard of him, and a lot of those people will even say they love him. The inclusion of Ross in this volume both extends and challenges the parameters of the canon as we currently understand them. Calling Bob Ross by his surname, the sign of respect or distance art historians generally give to artists, feels odd. He is more “Bob” to me than “Ross,” more a friend than a historical figure. Bob became famous for hosting The Joy of Painting, a thirty-minute program recorded at WIPB in Muncie, Indiana, in which he painted a landscape from start to finish, usually featuring mountains and trees. The show originally ran on PBS from 1983 to 1994, totaling almost four hundred episodes, and it appears on both public television and the internet today, in the United States and abroad. Instructional publications, workshops, painting supplies, and an array of merchandise still bear Bob’s name and image, crowned by his signature Afro perm.1 OB ROSS IS A STRANGE

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figure 126 Bob Ross working at easel, n.d. Collection of the artist’s estate. © Bob Ross Inc. Used with permission.

Only recently have Bob’s works been displayed in an art museum context. In Chicago in 2019, four of his paintings appeared in an exhibition, New Age, New Age: Strategies for Survival, at the DePaul Art Museum. In the same year, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History acquired paintings, studio artifacts, and archival materials from Bob Ross Inc., the organization (headquartered in Herndon, Virginia) that represents the artist’s official legacy. That his artworks and associated materials found their way into a history museum, rather than an art museum, is further evidence of Bob’s uneasy fit within art history. The Smithsonian’s plan is to place Bob in an exhibit addressing two other beloved PBS show hosts, Julia Child and Fred Rogers.2 Most “great” American artists created one or more masterpieces, enduring evidence of their artistic importance, but Bob’s importance must be measured in other ways. His landscape paintings are predictable and formulaic, but the individual works he created are largely beside the point, if we want to think about who he was as an artist, what he stood for, and why he matters. The main book-length study of the artist, Happy Clouds, Happy Trees: The Bob Ross Phenomenon (2014), addresses this matter. Canonical artists usually don’t achieve that status for being kind to others or warm, loving, and encouraging. That Bob loved painting, wanted to share that love, and showed us how to be good in the process is his real contribution and legacy. 276

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figure 127 Bob Ross, Mountain Stream, 1986. Oil on canvas, 18 × 24 in. Collection of the artist’s estate. © Bob Ross Inc. Used with permission.

Bob Ross was not a great artist according to any of the existing standards. To make an argument for Bob’s canonicity based on some new evaluation of his technical ability or the quality of his work does not interest me. Writing about him in the context of this book raises other compelling questions, though. Bob was primarily a teacher, and teaching was something like an artistic medium for him—perhaps even more than it was for the historical American artists we celebrate for their lesson more than for their own work. Bob’s work consisted of him painting while teaching others at the same time. His soft voice and soothing form of address made his program a relaxing experience for many viewers. His show was not spectacular, but the images he created appeared as if by magic on the canvas. People could paint along, but only a small percentage did; most viewers simply watched, mesmerized. This is not to say that nonpainting viewers did not learn from Bob, but what they learned was more about love than it was about making paintings. This love included love of the environment. His landscapes are filled with “happy trees” and “happy clouds”; among the critters who accompanied him on The Joy of Painting was his pet squirrel Peapod. In his loving narration, he even animated stone—he once named a BOB ROSS

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stone Harold. Bob displayed particular concern for injured and stray animals, and this concern extended to lonely, sick, and disabled persons; he once painted a work in gray tones on his show after meeting a man who was color-blind and afraid he couldn’t learn to paint. One of the authors of Happy Clouds, Happy Trees, Danny Coeyman, says that Bob made him more accepting of himself, including his homosexuality, and that The Joy of Painting gave him and other outsiders a sense of community.3 Whether we add him to the canon or not, Bob can be meaningfully brought into existing frameworks of American art history. In my current version of the American art survey, I mention Bob briefly in a discussion of Rufus Porter, a nineteenth-century painter and inventor. Porter was rather Bob Ross–like in his publication of self-study guides, helping people learn to paint outside of an art school context. Porter’s time- and labor-saving methods, especially visible in his landscape murals, also included simplified, abstracted approaches, such as sponging, which were readily replicated by others. As with paintings in a Bob Ross style, it can be very difficult to distinguish Porter’s murals from the works of his imitators. Both artists cast shade on originality as a determinant of art historical significance; while they were historically singular, they passed along their skills and knowledge. In my course, we consider Porter’s role in the democratization of art and how, in that regard, he is a forerunner of Bob, though Bob ultimately went further.4 One of the best points made in Happy Clouds, Happy Trees is that Bob Ross is not so much an individual as he is a “distributed intelligence”—an intelligence that is, above all, positive and creative.5 This intelligence cuts across differences in social background, making painting relevant to people who are otherwise framed out of the “art world.” I have seen Bob Ross–style paintings hanging everywhere from my white, middle-class parents’ New Hampshire home to the African American chaplain’s office at Stateville, the maximum-security men’s prison outside Chicago where I work as part of an activist teaching collective. That the artist seems more Bob than Ross is related to his unusual ability to connect to a popular audience through painting. He was an everyman; he wore jeans and spoke about art in a way that was approachable, unpretentious. Some of his brushes were like house-painting brushes, and he joked about his identification with working-class people. Bob was unflaggingly encouraging of his viewers and students, insisting that there are “no errors” in painting, only “happy accidents.” He believed that “talent is a pursued interest” and deemphasized traditional notions of artistic genius.6 He and his followers frustrate our ability to neatly sort amateur from professional. Bob himself was not educated at art school, but learned on his own and from Bill Alexander, a German émigré and the most widely watched TV painter in the United States before Bob. While we would not call him an “outsider artist,” Bob pointed in all sorts of ways to the boundaries that constitute canonical art history. Although he was eventually financially successful, that success no more summarizes his professional achievement than his noncanonical status does. It bears mentioning that while he worked on The Joy of Painting, his paintings were sold to benefit PBS, and today his paintings are rarely available for purchase.7 Though Bob Ross Inc. continues to profit from his legacy, his was truly a gift economy. With just one exception, human figures were absented 278

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figure 128 Davy T. “Painterman” (Davy Turner), The Bald Eagle Mountain, 2013. Oil on canvas, dimensions unknown. Courtesy of the artist.

from Bob’s works in these years, though many of his paintings include a modest cabin, providing refuge for imagined occupation. Through his life and work, Bob Ross did nothing less than gift us a place to live. A more cynical writer might mount arguments that would place Bob in a historical trajectory of easel painting, connecting him to the perpetuation of bourgeois ideology; one might also contend that he traffics in a genre (or, as W. J. T. Mitchell calls landscape, a “medium”) that is bound inextricably to problematic cultural apparatuses, such as nationalism and imperialism.8 Even the bald eagle in the Bob-style Davy T. “Painterman” canvas illustrated here reads not as time-worn political iconography but rather as the artist’s rediscovery of the bird’s other meanings: eagles also signify goodness and new beginnings. As Bob did, in so many ways, Davy coaxes us to unlearn what we thought we knew. Congdon, Blandy, and Coeyman argue that Bob’s work is less oriented to the past (and, implicitly, to the historical development of landscape art) than to the future, and that seems right. In show after show, Bob paints images of a world of goodness and generosity, a world that is yet to come. He helps us envision “a new way of thinking, a new community, a new painting, a new way of being in the world.”9 BOB ROSS

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NOTES 1.  The best introductory biography of Bob Ross is a documentary film: Sherry Spradlin, dir., Bob Ross: The Happy Painter (2011). Based mainly on the documentary, Bob’s biography is also summarized in Kristin G. Congdon, Doug Blandy, and Danny Coeyman, Happy Clouds, Happy Trees: The Bob Ross Phenomenon (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2014), 15–25. 2.  See Meilan Solly, “New Investigation Answers Pressing Question: Whatever Happened to All of Bob Ross’ Paintings?,” Smithsonian Magazine, July 18, 2019, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/whatever-happened-all-bob-ross-paintings-180972672/. As a guest on The Phil Donahue Show in 1994, Bob remarked that his works might hang in a museum someday, but “probably not the Smithsonian.” 3.  Congdon et al., Happy Clouds, Happy Trees, 101. 4.  See Rufus Porter, A Select Collection of Valuable and Curious Arts, and Interesting Experiments (Concord, NH: J. B. Moore, 1826). 5.  Congdon et al., Happy Clouds, Happy Trees, 93–106. 6.  Quoted in Spradlin, Bob Ross: The Happy Painter. 7.  See Larry Buchanan, Aaron Byrd, Alicia DeSantis, and Emily Rhyne, “Where Are All the Bob Ross Paintings? We Found Them,” New York Times video feature, July 12, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/video/ arts/100000005865824/bob-ross-paintings-mystery.html. 8.  W. J. T. Mitchell, “Imperial Landscape,” in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and Power, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5–34. 9.  Congdon et al., Happy Clouds, Happy Trees, 155.

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SPEAKING OF STILL LIFES—AND LISTENING TO THEM, TOO

have been favorite subjects for some artists, at least from seventeenth-century Holland forward. In the United States, still lifes were generally the preoccupation of specialists who were outnumbered by figurative and landscape artists. Yet the genre flourished in some communities, such as Philadelphia—home to specialists including members of the Peale family, William Harnett, and John Frederick Peto. Elsewhere, other artists might pursue their still-life interests in relative isolation and at less expense, for human models were not required and domestic objects were readily available. Still-life images had a strong appeal for some audiences who prized the often meticulous rendering of the objects posed by the artist. Other collectors placed a premium on loosely brushed, colorful arrangements of pigments and were drawn to more modern pictures describing (or at least suggesting) inanimate objects. Such motifs might bespeak harvest bounty, material wealth, or their absence; alternatively, they might personify the patron or convey a sense of loss or bereavement. In some cases, still-life subjects conveyed an artist’s personal experience or memory, or even obsession, which might be proclaimed loudly or sotto voce, or even in code.

DEPICTIONS OF OBJECTS CAREFULLY ARRANGED

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TRAVIS NYGARD

GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER b. ca. 1864, Diamond, Missouri d. 1943, Tuskegee, Alabama

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S A PEANUT RESEARCHER , George Washington Carver was one

of the most celebrated American scientists of the twentieth century. However, the fact that he was passionate for the arts is little known among art historians. More generally, as a gay Black man who was born into slavery, who became educated during a time when many institutions rejected students of color, and who became a successful professional at a time that was characterized by prejudices, his story is remarkable. His paintings of flowers and the way that he encouraged rural people to express their creativity should earn him a place in the story of American art. However, what makes his artistic life fascinating is that he was an artist who thought like a scientist, and a scientist who thought like an artist. Some of Carver’s best work was produced during the late nineteenth century at Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa. There he skillfully painted flowers. Hoping to become a professional artist, he explored the possibility of apprenticeships in Paris. Perhaps inspired by the philosophy and affectations of contemporaries in the aesthetic movement, such as James McNeill Whistler and Oscar Wilde, he cultivated a public persona as a well-groomed dandy—complete with a fresh flower in his lapel—and he maintained this image throughout his life. 283

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The paintings that Carver produced during his years at Simpson, and the acclaim they achieved, are remarkable. Creative practice was not, however, his sole focus of learning. His art teacher, Etta Budd, believed that painting “was natural for him,” but she advised him against art as a career because she believed that he would be destined to lead a life of financial struggle.1 Carver had shown her plants that he grafted, and she encouraged him to apply his acumen to the sciences. He did so, in the realm of agriculture most fully linked to aesthetics—horticulture, the art of breeding and growing garden plants, including flowers. Budd facilitated Carver’s transfer to the Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, where her father was on the faculty. While studying agriculture, Carver clung to his identity as an artist. He spent the 1892–93 winter break studying art at Simpson, and he retained hopes of someday studying painting at the Art Institute of Chicago or in Paris. In 1893 he entered several of his paintings in a competition in Cedar Rapids, whose winners were to be displayed at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Three of his works received this honor. However, due to the expense and awkwardness of transporting large canvases, he was able to bring only one to the world’s fair. This painting, listed as Yucca and Cactus in the catalogue, had been deemed Carver’s best by his teacher.2 To facilitate his trip, students and faculty paid for the train fare and a new suit. Good botanical paintings are the result of careful scrutiny of nature, and that is certainly present here. The artist was fascinated by the physical scale and colors of plants, which he could transform through breeding. The angustifolia or gloriosa variety of yucca that he depicted can grow six or more feet tall. To depict the plant, Carver chose to use a canvas that was similarly sized, and he filled the picture plane with two yuccas in full bloom, then separated us from them by including cacti at the base. The result is a plant that feels equal in presence to the viewer, and we might look at it with careful gazes like scientists. Carver hinted that this approach is appropriate for the painting by later using a scientific Latin name for its title, Yucca, Angustifolia and Cactus, when it was catalogued by the George Washington Carver Museum.3 Both the yucca plants and the painting’s composition have bilateral symmetry. Sword-like leaves extend from the base, the lowest examples bending downward under their own weight. From the center of each of these clusters of leaves a single flower stalk rises upward. The uppermost portion of each stalk is obscured by a large mass of white bell-shaped flowers. By his careful attention to details, Carver nudges us to appreciate botany. Great art is not, however, a mechanical process of documentation, and Carver’s imagery is more than a reflection of nature. It represents creativity. In a painting completed sometime between 1900 and 1920, we see his imagination at work as he depicts white Mentzelia flowers. These plants, popularly known as “moonflowers” or “blazing stars,” have blossoms that open in the late afternoon and close by morning. To capture temporal dynamism, Carver shows the plants changing as our eyes move across the canvas. Fully opened blooms fill the foreground, but as our eyes meander upward they begin to close until we reach the top, where the buds are entirely unopened. What we see is thus a fantasy of flowers that do not literally exist, a continuous narration of botanical reality. 284

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figure 129 George Washington Carver, Yucca, Angustifolia and Cactus, 1892–94. Oil on canvas, 72 × 42 in. Collection of Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site, National Park Service, catalogue no. TUIN 1219. The Tuskegee University Archives, Tuskegee University. Photograph by Travis Nygard.

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figure 130 George Washington Carver with painting of white Mentzelia flowers, ca. 1900–20. Photograph. Collection of Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site, National Park Service. The Tuskegee University Archives, Tuskegee University.

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Carver kept both paintings until the founding of the George Washington Carver Museum in 1941, which continues to house them today. The paintings now appear dark, and all lines have soft edges. This is not, however, an accurate reflection of Carver’s intent. A fire broke out in the museum in 1947, and his paintings were heavily damaged by smoke, heat, and water. They were cleaned and conserved, but discoloration, blistering, and paint loss sadly remain visible, so the works have an unsettling, haunting appearance. As we look at Carver’s paintings, we might wonder if he daydreamed about botanical life and wished to control it. Primary documents hint that he may well have been pondering such desires. His bachelor’s thesis from 1894 was titled “Plants as Modified by Man,” and it contained a charge to scientists to think like artists: “Why should not the horticulturist know just how to build up size, flavor, vigor and hardiness in his fruits and shrubs, and the florist know just how to proceed to unite, blende [sic] and perfect the color of his flowers, producing not only harmony, but a glorious symphony of nature’s daintiest tints and shades, with just as much certainty as the artist mixes his pigments upon the palette.”4 He clearly believed that scientists could and should emulate fine artists, and in the next stage of his career he did just that. Carver was recruited by the great African American intellectual Booker T. Washington to work at Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University, in 1896. This historically Black land-grant institution proved to be a fertile place for Carver to teach about and experiment with plants. In the popular imagination, Carver is celebrated for his work at Tuskegee, including compiling ideas about how to use peanuts, sweet potatoes, and other agricultural products in the rural South. He did this with gusto, while continuing to explore his artistic interests in his spare time. Carver also met Austin Wingate Curtis Jr., who was to become his research assistant and best friend, and who today would be thought of as a domestic partner. They intertwined their lives, and Carver willed book royalties and intellectual property to Curtis. Their personal bond, along with Carver’s lack of a wife, led the historians Linda Rapp and Jim Kepner to characterize Carver and Curtis as a gay couple. Curtis also helped found the aforementioned museum for Carver. Concurrent with Carver’s work on foodstuffs, he encouraged farm families to enrich their lives with art and handicrafts. He even taught them to make paint and dyes from local materials. While Carver’s primary responsibility was to teach the American people about scientific approaches to farming, he also enriched their lives aesthetically. As Curtis once explained, “he was telling the housewives how they could take the various vegetable dyes, dye their feed sacks and then embroider them or do needle working to make them more attractive . . . for chair backs and for table covers.”5 Whether because of Carver’s lifelong enthusiasm for fine painting, his bolstering of humble folk art, or his exceptional biography, this is an artist who is worthy of remembering. NOTES 1.  Quoted in Linda O. McMurry, George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 31. 2.  Report of the Iowa Columbian Commission (Chicago: The Commission, 1893), 210.

GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER

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3.  Austin Wingate Curtis Jr., The Carver Art Collection (Tuskegee, AL: Tuskegee Institute, 1941), 2. 4.  George Washington Carver, “Plants as Modified by Man,” bachelor’s thesis, Iowa State University, 1894, 6. 5.  Quotation from transcribed interview of Austin Curtis by Toby Fishbein, March 3, 1979, Iowa State Special Collections, George Washington Carver File, Box 2, p. 17.

FOR FURTHER READING Curtis, Austin Wingate, Jr. The Carver Art Collection. Tuskegee, AL: Tuskegee Institute, 1941. Holt, Rackham. George Washington Carver: An American Biography. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1943. McMurry, Linda O. George Washington Carver: Scientist and Symbol. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981. Walcott, B. B. “Meet George Washington Carver, American Artist.” Service, January 1942, 9–10, 30.

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SARAH BURNS

HOBSON PITTMAN b. 1899, Epworth, North Carolina d. 1972, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania

Hobson Pittman: Poet-Painter of the Empty Chair

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is not widely known, to put it mildly, but during his lifetime he enjoyed a considerable measure of acclaim. Raised in Tarboro, North Carolina, Pittman studied at Penn State and other institutions, ultimately settling in the Philadelphia area, where he taught at various local schools. He was featured in Life magazine in 1945 and eagerly collected by upper-crust lovers of romantic, antimodern art. Despite living in the North over the entire span of his career, Pittman worshipped at the shrine of the old moonlight-and-magnolias South and never abandoned his Southern manners and perspectives. The abiding sentiment of his work, indeed, was nostalgia for the lost Victorian world of his childhood, compounded by his lifelong search, and need, for a mother—his own mother’s death when he was still in his teens having been a traumatic blow from which he never recovered. From the 1930s on, Pittman dedicated himself to recreating that childhood world in a long succession of haunting interiors that evoke the vanished scenes he longed to recover. Indeed, Pittman felt he had been born in the Victorian era because of the houses he lived in and visited, the latter populated by ancient widows and spinsters, relics of the Civil War and keepers of Southern memory. These houses, as Pittman noted more than ODAY THE NAME HOBSON PITTMAN

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figure 131 Hobson Pittman, Miss Pat and Miss Eva Lyon, ca. 1943. Oil on canvas, 30 × 40 ¹/₈ in. Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, Tennessee. Memphis Park Commission purchase, 44.4. © Estate of the artist.

once, had tall ceilings, towering doors, lofty windows, and capacious porches. In tableaux that he drew from such childhood memories, those fragile ladies drink tea on horsehair sofas, rock in Victorian chairs, or drift through dim rooms and dark corridors. Pittman’s interiors have a dreamlike unreality, where spectral inhabitants exist in a moody atmosphere of thick shadow or ghostly moonlight, as in Miss Pat and Miss Eva Lyon, actual personages from Pittman’s youth. One sister plays a massive square grand piano, and the other stands looking on, or perhaps singing. The room is vastly overscale, as if to suggest a child’s-eye view. The enormous doors are flung open onto a nebulous blue landscape made all the more ethereal by Pittman’s feathery technique. A full moon shines through banked clouds, and a massive tree casts leafy shadows into the stage-like space, where several empty Victorian chairs are scattered about, as if waiting for absent listeners. It is not difficult to understand why many critics have associated Pittman with the eerie tales of Edgar Allan Poe and, more generally, the Southern Gothic, ever haunted by the Lost Cause and the eternal curse of slavery, invisible here yet intrinsically a part of the world that Pittman evoked with such wistful sentiment. Pittman’s nostalgia was all about personal loss, too, as we see in The Widow, which embodies that strain of melancholy memory in his art. Bright moonlight streams through a tall 290

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figure 132 Hobson Pittman, The Widow, 1937. Oil on linen, 15 × 25 ¹/₈ in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Museum purchase, 38.51. Digital image © Whitney Museum of American Art; licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

window into a nearly empty room. Facing the window, a woman in blue huddles in a rocking chair, her face obscured save for a narrow slice of profile. Above her on the wall is a giltframed painting of an old-fashioned couple—ancestors, no doubt—and on a draped table by the window stands the photographic portrait of a young man in a dark Victorian frame suggestive of mourning. Although the moon is bright and the décor warmly tinted in red and ochre, surrounding shadows encroach on the figure, and her diminutive size in that barren emptiness intensifies the sense of her loneliness and isolation. It is not too great a stretch, in fact, to see in this figure a projection of the artist himself, who went through life desperately seeking a soulmate. For many years, Pittman boarded with Sarah Carter in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania. Twenty-five years his senior, Carter lived in an old house filled with Victorian furniture and décor. Never married, she was a Quaker, a gardener, and a gentle homebody. Their relationship went far beyond that of tenant-landlord. Craving the maternal love he had lost, Pittman found consolation in Carter—his second mother, as he described her—who doted on him, fussed over his health, and cheerfully ran his errands. Pittman cocooned himself in Miss Carter’s Victorian world—until her death in 1949 forced him to strike out on his own. Something about Hobson Pittman brought out the mother in many of his acquaintances. After he found a new home in Bryn Mawr, wealthy Main Line dowagers reportedly made regular deliveries of hot dishes and pastries to his back door, accompanied by affectionate notes. But supreme among Pittman’s other mothers was Margaret Sanger, pioneering birth-control campaigner and founder of Planned Parenthood. Like Aunt Nannie, Sanger HOBSON PITTMAN

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figure 133 Hobson Pittman, The Departure, ca. 1950. Oil on Masonite, 17 × 24 in. American University Museum, Washington, D.C. Gift from the Trustees of the Corcoran Gallery of Art (Gift of Dr. Claiborne T. Smith), CGA.1998.41.1.

was considerably older. They met in 1945 and fell madly in love. The relationship may never have been consummated: when Pittman and Sanger took a much-anticipated trip to Europe after World War II, the artist abruptly abandoned her in Geneva and fled home. She later scolded him for running away from romance (or sex). Nevertheless, their affair—whatever it was—continued for years, Sanger calling Pittman her “Prince Charming,” and he writing torrents of letters to his “Glorious Margaret,” complaining of his loneliness, his chronic depressions, and his woeful longing for her company. Their reunions, however infrequent, were invariably euphoric. But loneliness and loss underlay whatever moments of happiness Pittman grasped with Glorious Margaret, and in his paintings and pastels he encoded those melancholy emotions in Victorian furniture. In Pittman’s interiors, a Belter sofa or a Rococo Revival chair was no mere antique but the symbolic surrogate for the absent person—or often for himself. Not for nothing was he known as the poet-painter of the empty chair. In The Departure, the vacant chair stands in for Aunt Nannie, who had died the previous year. On a round table draped in white is the framed portrait of a woman, above which hangs a large portfolio overflowing with what must be drawings—clearly a proxy for the artist who mourns the loss of that nurturing maternal presence. 292

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Pittman in his prime had an eager market for his work; he produced several paintings a year for the Milch Galleries in New York and the Biltmore Gallery in Los Angeles, and collectors snapped them up. Even Edward Hopper admired him. He created moonlight-andmagnolia scenes for the magazines Holiday and Life, and over the decades taught legions of students at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, among them Gothic filmmaker David Lynch. Perhaps feeling the pressure of the mainstream, in later life Pittman gave his old themes an angular modernist edge and lightened his palette to a range of delicate pastel tints that dispelled the ghostly gloom of his earlier signature style. From first to last, Pittman’s range was narrow, but at his best he encapsulated the dreams and memories of an idealized and whitewashed South that existed nowhere outside his own imagination.

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ANGELA MILLER

PRISCILLA ROBERTS b. 1916, Glen Ridge, New Jersey d. 2001, Georgetown, Connecticut

Nothing could be more natural than that we should, at such a time as this, ransack our native past as though it were an ancestral attic. john peale bishop, kenyon review 3, no. 2 (spring, 1941)

Priscilla Roberts’s Haunted Attics

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The Attic Scene populates an “ancestral attic” with a cobweb-covered spinning wheel, a delicate china doll dressed in Victorian silks, dismembered hands from a mannequin, a neo-rococo china pitcher, a stuffed parakeet, a marble bust, a helmet, and—against the back wall—a faded print of Emanuel Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware. In Roberts’s shadowed world raked by light, discarded objects carry talismanic powers of recall. “I am a shameless and avowed symbolist,” Roberts claimed. “The symbolism of objects as well as their beauty and the joy of rendering them is what most profoundly moves me.”1 Drawing was, in her words, “the finest spiritual exercise,” a painstaking process of bringing the objects before her to life in the imagination, and thus into a form of communion with the world.2 Prints, old readers, steamer trunks, parasols, and other family heirlooms, along with objects she retrieved—pulling a wagon along the street—from local antiquarians and junk dealers, fueled her imagination, like that of another collector, Joseph Cornell. Both artists were unworldly, utterly absorbed in a past made palpably present through its fragile artifacts. But Roberts was not an antiquarian. Her symbolically RISCILLA ROBERTS’S

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figure 134 Priscilla Roberts, The Attic Scene, 1946–47. Oil on Masonite, 44 ¾ × 38 ½ in. Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio. Museum purchase, Derby Fund, 2003.02.

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figure 135 Priscilla Roberts, In the Attic, 1949. Oil on panel, 23 ⁷/₈ × 22 ⁷/₈ in. Dallas Museum of Art. Gift of C. R . Smith, 1953.52.

charged still lifes explore the dissolution of organic ties between things in the world: triggers of memory, they speak of obsolescence, the wreckage of dreams, the demise of heroic ideals in a diminished present. Different versions of Roberts’s signature china doll appear elsewhere, such as in her 1949 painting In the Attic, where it is set alongside a skull, conjuring a reflection on transitory beauty and spurned promises. Roberts’s vanitas joins other works of the period in exploring themes of fleeting earthly pleasures, including George Tooker’s Dance (1946), which draws on medieval allegories of death; and Charles Rain’s nocturnal scenes of Victorian funerary and memorial sculpture, which recall the Gothic opening of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane 296

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(1939).3 The closed, worn, and locked steamer trunk—with its suggestion of voyages long past—evokes the unlived life of those whose most vivid experiences arrive through dreams. A huge black moth offers a further macabre note, redeemed by a duskily opalescent blue butterfly that issues from the mouth of the skull: death and transfiguration.4 The doll’s face is half darkened by the looming presence of a stuffed bird casting a predatory shadow on the wall behind her.5 Suggestions of lost or threatened innocence connect Roberts to Joseph Cornell’s Bébé Marie, a boxed construction of the early 1940s. Historian Jodi Hauptman finds in this work an unsettling linkage between Cornell’s preservationist impulse—to “box and encase” the past—and necrophilia.6 Roberts’s still-life paintings also play on the uneasy boundary between the living and the dead, but they suggest necromancy more than necrophilia: the dark power to reanimate that which is inanimate. Roberts accomplishes the feat of reanimation with a miraculously palpable light that infuses the shadowed interiors of her still lifes, contributing a baroque quality of chiaroscuro. Roberts used light to animate objects in the stilled quiescent and musty domestic spaces of parlor, bedroom, and attic, endowing her interiors with enigmatic drama that positions us as observers in a theater where mysterious forces of inanition and rebirth—death and transfiguration—are enacted.7 She had studied Vermeer’s luminous Maid Servant Pouring Milk (ca. 1660) obsessively for days on end at the New York World’s Fair in 1940. The objects around which she built her meticulously composed and painted works seem to have been recovered from another life. They convey an uncanny charge, a spectral presence in the slick environments of postwar America. Necromancy takes on other shapes in Roberts’s work. The iconic power of Life Mask (Abraham Lincoln) (1961–62, Smithsonian American Art Museum) uncannily evokes the person it commemorates, exceeding in death, memory, and history what Lincoln was in life. Much of the power of her work lies here—in the lifelike quality of the dead, the vivid conjuration of what once was and is no more, except in memory and imagination. This intense absorption in the past, embodied in found objects, was an impulse more broadly felt among those associated with the various forms of “magic” or symbolic realism— what Jeffrey Wechsler and Greta Berman called “the other side of American painting” in 1981.8 On the occasion of her first solo exhibition in 1961, Roberts was identified as “the most talented and accomplished Magic Realist in America.”9 She had studied briefly at Radcliffe and the Yale School of Art, thereafter entering the Art Students League and the National Academy of Design. For most of her career, she was represented by the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York City, which specialized in the work of American realists and magic realists. By the late 1940s, Roberts had gained both popular and institutional recognition with small still-life paintings focused around well-worn objects resonant with human use and suffused with personal and collective memory traces.10 Largely housebound and reclusive, Roberts lived with her sister and twelve cats in Weston, Connecticut, her life recalling that of another reclusive New England symbolist—Emily Dickinson. She was, by her own account, “blissfully happy” in her self-chosen life of art, never showing the least interest in her PRISCILLA ROBERTS

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figure 136 Priscilla Roberts, Self-Portrait, 1946. Oil on Masonite, 29 ⁷/₈ × 14 ¹/₈ in. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Museum purchase, 1991.197.

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own success as an artist, even as she commented on the strange anachronism of her chosen genre in mid-century America.11 Painting in an excruciatingly slow process, Roberts had produced nearly one hundred works by her death in 2001. Characterized by a common interest in “sharp focus and precise representation,” a quasihallucinatory hyperrealism of minute facture and non-painterly precision, magic realism encompassed a broad, regionally diverse array of artists, who were both temperamentally and ideologically resistant to the philosophical premises and technical procedures of the abstract painters who have dominated accounts of postwar painting.12 Magic realism substituted laborious technique for the improvisatory, accidental, and spontaneous gestural language of many of the “New York School” painters. Lincoln Kirstein, in the introduction to the 1943 exhibition American Realists and Magic Realists at the Museum of Modern Art, linked this mode to “a puritanical artifice wherein a termite gusto for detail is substituted for exuberance,” and “painstaking handling for the spontaneous miracles of bold brushwork and edible surfaces.”13 Kirstein joined a number of other voices in the 1940s in recognizing a native tradition reaching back to the nineteenth century: an unworldly symbolic imagination that departed from the social field of the European novel. Symbolism heralded the triumph of imagination over the unyielding determinism of things or of social constraints. Concurrent with the shift of interest in the visual arts toward “symbolic realism,” and its antecedents in the tight airless fabulism of the nineteenth century, the recovery of literary symbolism also drove this postwar fascination with the nineteenth-century past. In 1958, Harry Levin called symbolism “the intrinsic mode of American writing.” The symbol—unlike allegory—was expansive, open-ended, and indeterminate. It carried “an inconclusive luxuriance of meaning,” a condensed figure for the hermaneutic process itself by which the isolated self opened “an intercourse with the world.”14 Symbolism taught its students that we know reality only through our imaginations, with their filters of memory and their burden of psychic experience. Voided of the symbol, nature and reality—the world beyond the self—become mute, a dead letter waiting to be activated by imagination. In the most extreme forms of the symbolist imagination, the symbol itself exerts a specific gravity powerful enough to draw everything into its field of force—producing the monomaniacal obsession of Melville’s Ahab, in a book whose revival dates back to the 1920s. Alongside symbolism was a revived interest in ritual, sometimes violent but collectively channeling instinctual forces capable of rending apart the psyche. Magic realism, by contrast, was driven by a conviction that repression—in the form of an imposed discipline of technique, ordering symbols, and the mediating power of history—was a necessary evil in the preservation of a symbolic order, the order of culture. As Freud had recognized in his 1930 essay “Civilization and Its Discontents,” repression—and thus neurosis—was critical to the maintainance of civilization itself. Culture channeled, formalized, and contained the unformed and potentially destructive energies harbored within the psyche. Magic realism shared with a number of other intellectual currents in the 1940s a conviction that childhood was the taproot of the human being, and that children acted out the PRISCILLA ROBERTS

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instinctual violence existing prior to learned behavior. In the 1940s and in the wake of two world wars, the “Gothic” gained new currency, emerging as a matter not of innocence confronted by evil, but of the radical intertwining of innocence and knowledge—the doll and the bird of prey. In innocence itself one finds the most savage elements of human behavior. Roberts’s history-haunted images join the works of Shirley Jackson, Philip Guston, Willem de Kooning, and others in these years around World War II in exploring the violence sheltered in the past—and present—of the human psyche. NOTES 1.  Quoted in Priscilla Roberts (Greenberg, PA: Westmoreland Museum of Art, 1984), one-page folder. 2.  Quoted in obituary for Roberts, The Wilton Connecticut Bulletin, August 16, 2001. 3.  For a suggestive analysis of the perennial fascination with Victoriana and the haunted psyche, see Sarah Burns, “ ‘Better for Haunts’: Victorian Houses and the Modern Imagination,” American Art 26, no. 3 (2012): 2–25. 4.  Other objects associated with the theme of “vanitas” in Roberts’s work include clocks, hourglasses, candles, death masks, and globes. 5.  On the symbolism of birds in magic realism, see Greta Berman and Jeffrey Wechsler, Realism and Realities: The Other Side of American Painting, 1940–1960 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Art Gallery, 1981). 6.  The theme of desire associated with a dead beloved also links Cornell’s imagination to Edgar Allan Poe, whose name often appears—along with Melville’s—as a symbolist predecessor to the magic realists. The looming shadowy presence of a stuffed bird in Roberts’s In the Attic recalls Poe’s The Raven. 7.  Arts Magazine, May 1961. The Vermeer was on loan from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. 8.  Berman and Wechsler, Realism and Realities. 9.  Arts Magazine, May 1961. 10.  Roberts’s popularity with a wider public was noted by the middlebrow Art Digest when she won the “Popular Prize” for her Still Life at the Allied Artists of America exhibition (December 15, 1946). The literalism with which she evoked the haunted past, and her devotion to detail (strongly gendered as feminine), has perhaps contributed to her being consigned to the shadowed attics of art history—it was a literalism the middlebrow public appreciated, but it placed her out of sync with the highbrow values of abstraction. “Her genius is to make detail a necessary enrichment of mood,” as one reviewer wrote in 1961. 11.  Quoted in Wechsler and Berman, Realism and Realities. 12.  The connection with surrealism was a point made in Dorothy Miller and Alfred Barr, “Introduction,” American Realists and Magic Realists (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943), 5. 13.  Ibid., 7. 14.  Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness Hawthorne, Poe, Melville (New York: Knopf, 1958), 19; Charles Feidelson, Symbolism and American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 7, 15.

FOR FURTHER READING Berman, Greta, and Jeffrey Wechsler. Realism and Realities: The Other Side of American Painting, 1940–1960. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Art Gallery, 1981. Burns, Sarah. “ ‘Better for Haunts’: Victorian Houses and the Modern Imagination.” American Art 26, no. 3 (2012): 2–25. Miller, Dorothy, and Alfred Barr. American Realists and Magic Realists. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943. Richmond-Moll, Jeffrey, ed. Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery, and Imagination in American Realism. Athens: Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, 2021.

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JEFFREY RICHMOND-MOLL

BRIAN CONNELLY b. 1926, Roseburg, Oregon d. 1963, Wilton, Connecticut

Brian Connelly: In the Garden of Dreams

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A Night Garden, a resplendent nocturnal landscape shimmers under the stars, dramatically illuminated by the cool light of an unseen full moon. Shadows dance off an espaliered pear tree, towering potted bushes bursting with fuchsia, pineapples, and limes, and two marvelous topiaries of a wedding couple (at right) and Christ as a gardener (at left). At the center of it all is Connelly himself, staring into the reflection of a silver butler’s ball in the act of painting the very picture before us. Connelly’s work first caught my attention when I began organizing an exhibition on the formation and legacy of a magic realist tradition in American art in late 2019. Indeed, A Night Garden is quintessential magic realism, an under-analyzed phenomenon in American art. Through sharp focus, suggestive ambiguity, and an uncanny assemblage of ordinary things, Connelly and his contemporaries not only show that the extraordinary is possible, but also conjure the strangeness and wonder of everyday life. With dazzling technical skill, A Night Garden emphasizes the tension between reality and deception, illusion and surface, the possible and impossible. Such works ultimately reveal how human life touches forces larger than itself—or, in Connelly’s words, how painting can “offer glimpses of the infinite through specific objects realistically portrayed.”1 N BRIAN CONNELLY’S

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figure 137 Brian Connelly, A Night Garden, 1955. Oil on panel, 18 × 30 in. The Schoen Collection.

Yet I was shocked to find scarcely a single source published on Connelly since his death in 1963. All that remains are scattered newspaper reviews of his paintings when they appeared in more than twenty-five exhibitions, staged over little more than a decade—from his solo debut in November 1950 at the American British Art Gallery in New York City, to what would have been a mid-career retrospective at Manhattan’s Banfer Gallery in winter 1962, had he not died the following year from a cardiac condition.2 His untimely death certainly hastened his obscurity among critics, scholars, and the general public. But Connelly is also largely unknown today because he was committed to Renaissance principles and to a magical exploration of figural realism, all against the rising tide of abstraction in the mid-century United States. His commercial and public success during his lifetime—as a fine artist, illustrator, and textile designer—offers an important lesson about the popularity of representational art in the 1950s and 1960s. It suggests a strong contrast to the rhetoric of a small group of New York–based art critics, one that provides a powerful rejoinder to the prevailing narratives of twentieth-century American art, which describe abstract expressionism as the most significant trend in American painting. Connelly began his studies in painting at the University of Oregon, but moved to New York City in 1946, enrolling briefly at the Art Students League—an institution committed to academic craftsmanship that also produced many prominent magic realists of the day— before he transitioned to the Parson’s School of Design. He earned a comfortable living and wider recognition as a commercial illustrator, with an advertising campaign for De Beers that earned him an award from the Art Directors Club of New York, as well as commissions 302

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figure 138a–d Brian Connelly, The Spectrum, 1952. Casein and oil on board, 37 ¼ × 41 ½ in. (hinged multi-panel painting). Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art, Loretto, Pennsylvania.

from Fortune, House Beautiful, and House and Garden. A passionate horticulturalist himself, Connelly was sought after for his talent in depicting plant life—although, as he emphasized (quoting John Ruskin), “If you can paint one leaf, you can paint the world.”3 Such illustrations look beyond their vernacular context in magazines like the Saturday Evening Post by probing the boundaries of representational art, whether examining the reflective and distorting qualities of glass or repeating the theme of a view through the window—an age-old meta-pictorial gesture, which points to painting itself as a window onto an imitated reality, and which he also employed in masterful trompe l’oeil paintings like Attraction (1950, Art Institute of Chicago). With this commercial popularity, as well as a successful business as a portrait painter, Connelly forged important connections in the art worlds of New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. In 1952, he became the youngest artist to win the popular prize at the Pittsburgh B R I A N C O N N E L LY

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figure 139 Brian Connelly with his painting David Homer, November 16, 1954. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten. Carl Van Vechten Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. © The Carl Van Vechten Trust.

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International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting, for The Spectrum. This four-part, sixteen-panel painting of a Renaissance hospice in Bonn, Germany, unfolds to show the same setting in four different color palettes, as if recalling shifting daylight or changing seasons: a yellow spring, the red-orange heat of summer, the cool blue of fall, and a gray winter dawn. Connelly’s position would also be cemented in Carl Van Vechten’s stable of modernist notables in two photographs from 1954. Their friendship lasted at least until 1962, when Van Vechten penned his signature in the Banfer Gallery’s guestbook for Connelly’s retrospective, alongside textile designer Marion V. Dorn, the magic realists John Koch and Charles Rain, and illustrator Hilary Knight, among others. By February 1956, a committee of artists and curators named him a promising “new talent” in a special issue of Art in America. Connelly thus deserves recognition alongside more well-known magic realists like Paul Cadmus and George Tooker, not least because he, too, relished the anachronism of his own paintings. Evoking the techniques of fifteenth-century Italian primitives and Flemish masters, Connelly also worked in casein, the preferred medium of contemporary commercial artists. A Night Garden, for example, combines traditional representation with the startling reflection of the modernist interior of his home studio, the radiant moonlight nearly outshone by the fluorescent glare of a green desk lamp. In its incongruities, this and other paintings by Connelly evoke realms untamed by or untethered to the forces that govern this world. Through reflections and distortions, and through startling, almost inconceivable juxtapositions—after all, where is this studio positioned in relation to the rock-strewn floor of this medieval garden?—Connelly captures those cracks in everyday reality, where the ordinary is transformed, even if only momentarily, into something extraordinary, too fantastic to be real. At the same time, Connelly sought to synthesize historical artistic principles with the concerns of avant-garde modernism, as in The Spectrum. That kinetic polyptych, with its patented hinged panels, investigates color and human vision much like the color field paintings of Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, which also emerged in those same years. In a volume devoted to forgotten, lost, or misremembered American artists, A Night Garden is also a singular expression of Connelly as an artist, a manifesto of who he was and a vision of what could have been, had his legacy not been obscured after his premature passing. Poised on the boundary between the sharp electric light and straight-edged modernist design of his domestic sphere and the immaculate, preternatural garden landscape, Connelly’s painting conjures the immensity of his own ingenuity, which radiates outward from a wondrous silver vessel. The studio emerges here as a space straddling reality and illusion. This, then, is a painting that epitomizes the artistic imagination, as a complex convergence of self, identity, and personal creativity. And, by imagining not simply what is but also what can be, the painting encourages us to imagine what might have been after the success of his 1962 retrospective. In other words, through this crystalline vision of a mystical nighttime world, which ruptures forth from the world we know, Connelly grants us a space to dream. B R I A N C O N N E L LY

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NOTES 1.  Quoted in “The March of Time” (Pittsburgh, PA), January 1, 1952, Getty Images, clip no. 509818327. This film clip shows Connelly painting in the same window-filled front room of his mid-century modern Connecticut home that appears in A Night Garden. 2.  This impressive ten-year run of exhibitions also included group shows at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, and the Walker Art Center, and solo exhibitions at the Dayton Art Institute, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Santa Barbara Museum of Fine Arts, and the Syracuse Museum of Fine Arts. See, for example, Stuart Preston, “Eyefoolers,” New York Times, November 25, 1951, 9; “Today’s Artist: Brian Connelly,” Lincoln Star, March 4, 1955, 8; C. R. S., “Brian Connelly,” ART News 61, no. 8 (1962): 58. 3.  John Ruskin, “Of Leaf Beauty,” in Modern Painters, vol. 5 (London: Smith, Elder, 1860), 36.

FOR FURTHER READING Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, ed., Extra Ordinary: Magic, Mystery, and Imagination in American Realism (Athens: Georgia Museum of Art, 2021).

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ENRICHING ABSTRACTION

FOR MUCH OF THE MODERN ERA , representational forms have been under

assault—by the impressionists’ dissolution of form in flurries of colorful brushstrokes, by the cubists’ fracturing of form into splintered shards, by the abstract expressionists’ slashing brushwork or skeins of poured pigment, by the minimalists’ erasure of form altogether. Influences from Europe inspired many early abstract artists in the United States. By the later decades of the twentieth century, however, innovations generated by American artists spawned new directions internationally in abstract, nonrepresentational art. Not all American abstraction has a common source or origin. Some outstanding imagery comes from women, who historically were often omitted from the abstract fraternity. Some abstractionists may have been overlooked because of geography; their zip codes were unfashionable, or at least unfamiliar, located somewhere in the great trans-Hudson West, far from the “New York School” and the coastal art press. Yet others have been overlooked because of their pedigree (or lack of one). Many noted abstractionists were trained at select art schools whose networks of alumni provided entrée to the professional ranks, access that graduates from other institutions may not have enjoyed. Still more challenging was the position of the self-taught artist seeking critical recognition for works that might be highly inventive and depart from familiar stylistic camps.

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LUCIA COLOMBARI

ATHOS CASARINI b. 1883, Bologna, Italy; active in the United States, 1907–1915 d. 1917, Carso, Italy

Visons of a Futurist City: Athos Casarini in New York

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I have been preaching war.” So wrote the young and idealistic painter Athos Casarini. He was swept up by the zeal of war as he boarded a steamer in New York Harbor, setting out to join the Italian army and fight the Austro-Hungarian enemy at the outset of World War I. Sadly, Casarini never made it back to America. He died on the battlefield on Monte San Gabriele on September 12, 1917, at the age of thirty-three. His brief career, the limited number of known works, and the shortage of sources and materials related to his American years have all combined to consign Casarini to art history oblivion. Yet the tragic tale of Casarini also opens a compelling but overlooked chapter not only in the history of the Italian diaspora but also for American art. His experience challenges our assumptions about the transnational spread of the artistic movement known as futurism and causes us to reconsider his previously unacknowledged influence on American modern art. Casarini died just as he was beginning to consolidate his reputation as a futurist in New York City. The day after he set sail for Europe, The World Magazine devoted an entire page to his departure: “The Futurist Hears the Call of War.” The article included a brief, affectionate farewell salute from Casarini to his artistic home, “this great Futuristic city of New S A FUTURIST AND A NATIONALIST

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figure 140 Athos Casarini, “The Futurist Hears the Call of War,” The World Magazine, August 15, 1915. Museo Civico del Risorgimento di Bologna.

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York.” As he left for Italy, he was “fortified by the iron I breathed in this exhilarating atmosphere” and by “the indelible memory of thy broad streets, with their agitated crowds, the vibrant fervour of thy factories and thy constructions, of thy busy rivers, of the sea that defends thee, of thy youth, thy faith, thy aspirations. O America, newest born of the immortals.”1 Initially, it wasn’t obvious that Casarini would be a pioneer of futurism. Encouraged by his brother Alberto, who had already immigrated to the United States, the artist arrived through Ellis Island on November 11, 1907.2 As his ship approached the port of New York, Casarini discovered something startlingly different from his native Bologna. At the age of twenty-four, he was shocked by the overwhelming size of the metropolis and the complexity and frenetic pace of American life. He exemplified a generation of immigrant artists with diverse cultural, social, and ethnic backgrounds, all attempting to articulate a visual response to their new home in the United States. During his first years in this country, he experimented with various styles commonly practiced by artists in New York City, from cityscapes akin to Robert Henri’s social realism to politically charged works in a symbolist style. Published as the cover of Harper’s Weekly in 1912, his New York Seen from Brooklyn captures the ever-changing city skyline, with smoke coming from a boat’s stack enveloping the skyscrapers and emphasizing their height. Beyond these circumstances, being recognized and accepted within American society, not to mention within an artistic community, was daunting for an Italian immigrant. Discrimination and stereotypes, coupled with a Francocentric view of the art world, constituted significant obstacles. The Italian-American community, however, offered Casarini a professional network and his first job opportunities. He soon became an illustrator for Italian-language magazines such as La Follia. Casarini ultimately found an artistic voice and recognition during his time in New York. His participation in the International Exhibition of Modern Art, also known as the Armory Show, which opened in New York in February 1913, proved to be a breakthrough event. Casarini’s entry in the exhibit, Crime, was a grotesque pastel, currently known only through a photograph.3 The Armory Show brought recognition as well as new sources of inspiration. Casarini was subsequently invited to participate in important exhibitions, and his drawings were frequently published in journals and magazines such as The Sunday Herald and Harper’s Weekly. In 1914 the Parisian Union Internationale des Beaux-Arts et des Lettres invited Casarini to become a member and exhibit at their salon. Unfortunately, the exhibition was canceled when the war broke out. In March 1914, a group show at the MacDowell Club in New York included nine of his works. The World Magazine singled him out for special attention, devoting two full pages to his work. In November of that year, the Folsom Gallery on Fifth Avenue traced his artistic evolution by displaying thirty-seven works in a monographic exhibition, which also received much positive notice in the press. Although Casarini was already in the United States when the founding futurist manifesto, by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, was published in France in 1909, he was surrounded by the Italian avant-garde in New York. The futurists did not participate in the Armory Show, but ATHOS CASARINI

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figure 141 Athos Casarini, New York Seen from Brooklyn, 1911. Harper’s Weekly cover, March 23, 1912. Hathi Trust Digital Library, digitized by University of Michigan.

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the art world was abuzz about this modern Italian movement. In their absence, Casarini became the unlikely face of Italian futurism in America, finding his true artistic identity. No other European avant-garde movement utilized manifestos as a primary means of communication and promotion like the futurists. Since Marinetti’s first manifesto, commentaries on futurism had spread from Europe to the United States mainly through newspapers’ foreign correspondents. Casarini’s encounter with futurism was secondhand, fostered by correspondence with artists in Italy, photographic reproductions, and publications, rather than direct encounters with original artworks. By coupling the reflections of his own immigrant experience with the futurists’ quest to break with an oppressive past, and their artistic lexicon capturing the dynamism of motion, Casarini created a highly personal interpretation of futurism. Eager to identify himself as a futurist, he produced at least three works exploring the subject of war. The futurists’ bombastic rhetoric on violence and conflict was controversial and mentioned often in the press in the years leading up to Italy’s entrance into the war in 1915. Casarini responded almost immediately with works like War at Austria. In that painting he captured the dynamism of a crowd surrounded by Italian flags through a pictorial style particularly connected to the work of the futurists Gino Severini and Umberto Boccioni. The same explosive atmosphere characterized a drawing in The Sunday Herald (1914), which defined the artist as “probably the leading exponent of futurism in this country [the United States].”4 The futurists’ figurative use of words became a recurrent trend. For example, Casarini’s illustration for “The Futurist Hears the Call of War” similarly utilized verbal slogans within a highly abstract composition. Importantly, Casarini’s works provide insight into transnational processes and dissemination of Italian futurism in America among modern artists and the mainstream public during the 1910s. Best known today is the Italian-born artist Joseph Stella (1877–1946), considered the first and foremost representative of futurism in the United States. In contrast to Casarini’s secondhand exposure to futurism, Stella’s example speaks to another means by which the movement was assimilated. During his travels in France and Italy, Stella directly encountered original artworks while visiting a futurist exhibition at the BernheimJeune gallery in Paris in 1912. Soon after his return to America, he began exploring Coney Island as an artistic subject and eventually reached a highly original futurist style in depictions of the Brooklyn Bridge, now considered iconic examples of futurism in America. Stella’s mature works are the result of a long gestation of futurist ideology. He synthesized the futurists’ most original ideas, without adopting the bold rhetoric of their manifestos and performances. Yet the case can be made for Casarini’s role in disseminating futurism. One example of his influence involves the artist James Daugherty (1889–1974), who in 1911 moved into an apartment in the same building as Casarini in Brooklyn Heights. Two years later, around the same time that Casarini first produced works in a futurist style, the New York Herald published a series of Daugherty’s illustrations that suggest familiarity with his neighbor’s work and with futurist Giacomo Balla’s depictions of movement through space. ATHOS CASARINI

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figure 142 Athos Casarini, War at Austria, 1915. Tempera, 24 ¹³/₁₆ × 17 ¹¹/₁₆ in. Location unknown. Image courtesy of Mario Casarini.

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Several futurist works that Casarini made between his exposure to the innovative style in 1913 and his departure for the war remain unlocated, mainly because they were sold through galleries in the United States and are yet to be traced. It appears that his attempts to incorporate a futurist visual vocabulary emerged shortly after the Armory Show. In works such as The Inventor (ca. 1914, Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna), multiple planes and diagonal tension lines in a futurist manner are coupled with an expressionist color palette. Discovering some of Casarini’s missing artworks would shed light on how he incorporated futurist aesthetics to produce a distinct art. For example, the oil painting Man and the Machine (ca. 1913–14) is currently known only through a black-and-white illustration.5 The title and stylistic choices discernible in the known photograph suggest that Casarini utilized futurist aesthetics to capture the urban changes brought about by industrialization and technology. The Bourgeois Galleries sold the artwork in 1918, after Casarini’s untimely death, and its location is unknown. The press mourned Casarini’s death in 1917 and speculated what might have become of the artist had he returned to his New York home. Today we are left wondering: Would he have continued along the futurist path? Would he have been better recognized for his contributions to the history of American art? Nevertheless, Athos Casarini is worth remembering for his significant role, no matter how brief, in expanding futurist ideas in the United States. NOTES This essay is dedicated to Mario Casarini, the tireless promoter of his great-uncle’s memory, who generously shared his collection of a lifetime. 1.  Athos Casarini, “The Futurist Hears the Call of War,” The World Magazine, August 15, 1915. 2.  The two major publications on Casarini disagree about the date of his arrival in the United States. Franco Solmi’s Athos Casarini, pittore (Bologna: Alfa, 1963) correctly states the year of his arrival as 1907. Original documents at the Statue of Liberty–Ellis Island Foundation (SOLEIF) confirm his entry on November 11, 1907. 3.  The work is reproduced in Claudio Poppi, ed., Athos Casarini futurista (Bologna: Abacus, 2003), 178. 4.  The Sunday Herald, cover of the magazine section, September 13, 1914. 5.  The work is reproduced in Poppi, Athos Casarini futurista, 179.

FOR FURTHER READING Poppi, Claudio, ed. Athos Casarini futurista. Bologna: Abacus, 2003. Solmi, Franco. Athos Casarini, pittore. Bologna: Alfa, 1963.

ATHOS CASARINI

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ERIK A DOSS

AGNES PELTON b. 1881, Stuttgart, Germany; arrived in the United States, 1888 d. 1961, Cathedral City, California

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was a rising star in New York’s art world, known for what she called “imaginative paintings” of ethereal figures, usually young women, posed in dreamy landscapes. Pelton studied with Arthur Wesley Dow at the Pratt Institute from 1895 to 1900, where her cohorts included modern painters Max Weber and Pamela Colman Smith (who illustrated the Rider-Waite tarot deck) and pictorialist photographer Gertrude Käsebier. From 1911 to 1914, she spent her summers at Hamilton Easter Field’s art school in Ogunquit, Maine, honing the symbolist attributes of her early paintings. Exhibited in New York galleries, including Macbeth and Knoedler, and in numerous group shows, Pelton’s art was collected by Mabel Dodge and John Quinn and reviewed by critics including Homer Saint-Gaudens and Henry McBride. She was one of fifty women (among 304 artists) represented in the 1913 Armory Show, where her imaginative paintings Vine Wood (1913, private collection) and Stone Age (1911, location unknown) were shown alongside works by American moderns Marsden Hartley and Charles Sheeler. In 1921, however, Pelton moved to Long Island, where she lived alone in an old windmill and began painting colorful, dynamic canvases that she christened “my abstractions.” Many depicted rays of light, N THE 1910s, AGNES PELTON

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figure 143 Agnes Pelton, Being, 1923–26. Oil on canvas, 26 × 21 ⁷/₈ in. Private collection.

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lotus flowers, lunar rainbows, orbs, and flames in enigmatic, mystical settings. Being, for example, features a swirling oval form that, Pelton wrote, emerges from “dark solid earth” and is “attended by light filling vapors.”1 She sought exhibition venues for her new work—in 1926 she showed Being at the Whitney Studio Club, and in 1929 she had a solo show of her abstractions at Montross Gallery—but failed to gain critical or curatorial support. In 1931, Pelton moved to Cathedral City, California, a small town near Palm Springs, where she spent the last decades of her life painting desert landscapes—she called them “tourist pictures”—to make a living, and painting mystically charged abstractions for herself. After the war, when abstract expressionism’s grand scale, turbulent brushstrokes, and beefy masculinity dominated modern American art, Pelton’s increasingly refined and meticulously glazed canvases were largely overlooked. She died in 1961, virtually forgotten in American art. Toward the end of the twentieth century, Pelton was rediscovered. In 1986, she was included in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s groundbreaking exhibit The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985. In 1989 and 1995, retrospectives of her work were organized at Ohlone College and the Palm Springs Desert Museum.2 In recent decades, Pelton’s reconsideration as an “overlooked female artist” entitled to a “rightful place within the canon of modern and contemporary art history” has steadily increased.3 In 2019, the Phoenix Museum of Art showcased her abstractions in a large show that traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art. Earlier, in 2009, she was aligned with other female American moderns in Illumination: The Paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Pelton, Agnes Martin, and Florence Miller Pierce. Reviewers were ecstatic. “Forget Georgia; Agnes Finally Gets Her Due,” Christopher Knight exclaimed in the Los Angeles Times, hailing Pelton’s “exquisitely handled painting technique” and “celestially cosmic visions.”4 Pelton’s disappearance and reappearance in American art can be traced to the spiritually resonant terms of her modern art, especially her abstractions. Pelton was a spiritual modern, an American artist whose modern paintings embodied the religious sources, beliefs, and practices she explored and absorbed, including New Thought, Theosophy, astrology, and Agni Yoga.5 In the swirling forms of Being, for example, Pelton drew on New Thought’s focus on spiritual selfrealization and Theosophy’s concept of spiritual evolution, of moving toward what Theosophy founder Helena Blavatsky called the Divine Self “at the end of the great cycle of being.”6 In Mother of Silence (1933), Pelton depicted the Holy Mother or female divine. That being was identified by New Thought founder Emma Curtis Hopkins (with whom Pelton studied in the early 1920s) in her feminist metaphysical movement; Helena Roerich, founder of Agni Yoga, similarly extolled the “spiritually sovereign position” of female psychic energy. The painting also features a slender cord referencing the “thread of spirit” or “immortal Ego” that Theosophists believe incarnates one life after the other in the journey toward Divine Self. Inspired by Dane Rudhyar’s “harmonic astrology,” Pelton also scanned the skies for spiritual insights and aesthetic guidance. Orbits (1934) features a trajectory of seven stars around Mount San Jacinto (the highest peak near Cathedral City), a design she said represented an “enclosing purpose—auras of love like guiding lights.”7 318

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figure 144 Agnes Pelton, Mother of Silence, 1933. Oil on canvas, 30 × 25 in. Private collection.

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figure 145 Agnes Pelton, Orbits, 1934. Oil on canvas, 31 ¼ × 27 ¼ in. Oakland Museum of California. Gift of Concourse d’Antiques, the Art Guild of the Oakland Museum of California.

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Pelton was not a cultist or a member of any organized faith. Her spiritual seeking was private, motivated by a desire to forge a modern art that embodied her personal interests in mystical experiences and spiritual understanding, and by her conviction that abstract styles— as Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky argued in his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911)— best conveyed them. Various spiritual movements provided paths to self-discovery and mental and physical healing, to new ways of seeing, knowing, and being. Each corresponded to deep and sustained interests in re-enchanting her modern art on spiritually powerful terms. Many twentieth-century American critics, curators, and historians, however, saw modernism and religion as inherently oppositional entities, and Pelton’s spiritual modernism was often derided. Reviewing a show of her abstractions at Argent Galleries in 1931, for example, an Art News writer commented, “Miss Pelton is a child of the new age. She is harbinger of the future for other painter poets.”8 This was a backhanded compliment, casting Pelton as a child (she was fifty) who embraced arcane ideas. In the 1930s, skepticism about religion, new and old, was a hallmark of American journalism. In the New York Sun, Henry McBride wrote, “Agnes Pelton is likely to prove a trifle difficult to the earthbound. Her work suggests esoteric initiations, mysterious rites and incantations in some vague borderland of the conscious that most are not permitted to enter.”9 McBride’s critical disdain continues to resonate. Reviewing the Whitney’s 2020 exhibition Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist, Alina Cohen compared Pelton’s “cloying” pictures and “Disneyfied sensibility” with art by Agnes Martin, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Hilma af Klint, who, “history tells us, painted to survive.” Pelton, Cohen remarks, painted as “a meditative exercise, expressing little true ambition while making attractive pictures,” and the exhibition “raises the question: Whose work truly deserves a second look—and a full show at a major institution?”10 Today, Pelton’s abstractions are coveted examples of modern American art. Their prices have skyrocketed, and museums around the country scramble to show them. In 2017, Pelton’s Ahme in Egypt and Sea Change (both 1931, Whitney Museum of American Art) were included in the Whitney’s survey of modern American art—and were copied in “eye-catching socks” available for purchase in the gift shop. Cultural and intellectual openness to expanded understandings of American modernism helps to explain Pelton’s contemporary popularity. Studies of modern art history today typically include considerations of race, gender, class, and sexual difference. Recognizing religion as a powerful determinant for many American moderns allows further insights into the broader relationships between art and faith in twentieth-century American art. NOTES 1.  Agnes Pelton, sketch for Being, ca. 1923, in the Agnes Pelton (AP) Papers, 1885–1989, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Microfilm Reel 3426, frame 620. 2.  See Maurice Tuchman, ed., The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 (New York: Abbeville Press for Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1985), 43–45; Margaret Stainer, Agnes Pelton (Fremont, CA: Ohlone College Art Gallery, 1989); and Michael Zakian, Agnes Pelton: Poet of Nature (Palm Springs, CA: Palm Springs Desert Museum, 1995).

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3.  Amanda Cruz, “Director’s Foreword,” in Gilbert Vicario, ed., Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2019), 15. 4.  Karen Moss, ed., Illumination: The Paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Pelton, Agnes Martin, and Florence Miller Pierce (London: Merrell, in association with Orange County Museum of Art, Newport Beach, CA, 2009); Christopher Knight, “Forget Georgia; Agnes Finally Gets Her Due,” Los Angeles Times, March 19, 1995, 52. 5.  Erika Doss, “Agnes Pelton’s Spiritual Modernism,” in Vicario, Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist, 31–39; see also Erika Doss, Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth-Century American Artists and Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022). 6.  Helena Blavatsky, The Key to Theosophy (London: Theosophical Publishing, 1889), 63. 7.  Agnes Pelton, sketch for Orbits, July 1934, AP Papers, Microfilm Reel 3426, frame 688. 8.  “Agnes Pelton, Contemporary Modernists, Argent Gallery,” Art News, February 21, 1931, 10. 9.  Henry McBride, “Variety Marks Art Displays, Miss Pelton and Modernists at Argent Gallery,” New York Sun, February 19, 1931. 10.  Alina Cohen, “Why Agnes Pelton’s Pretty Paintings Play Well Right Now,” Artsy.net, March 13, 2020, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-agnes-peltons-pretty-paintings-play.

FOR FURTHER READING Ehrlich, Susan. “Agnes Pelton.” In Paul J. Karlstrom and Susan Ehrlich, eds., Turning the Tide: Early Los Angeles Modernists, 1920–1950. Santa Barbara, CA: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1990. pp. 147–149. Perlmutter, Penny. “Agnes Pelton: Images of the Sublime and Female Patrons Who Permitted Them.” Master’s thesis, San Francisco State University, 1994. Sheley, Nancy Strow. “Bringing Light to Life: The Art of Agnes Pelton, 1881–1961.” PhD diss., University of Kansas, 2000. Stainer, Margaret. “Agnes Pelton.” In Jan Rindfleisch, ed., Staying Visible: The Importance of Archives: Art and “Saved Stuff” of Eleven 20th Century California Artists. Cupertino, CA: Helen Euphrat Museum of Art, De Anza College, 1981.

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BARBARA HASKELL

HELEN TORR b. 1886, Roxbury, Pennsylvania d. 1967, Bayshore, Long Island, New York

Helen Torr: A Dream Deferred

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OW WAS IT THAT HELEN TORR ,

a talented painter in Alfred Stieglitz’s circle of modernist artists, died in obscurity at eighty, convinced that her art was worthless? Was it simply her gender that caused her art to be underappreciated, or was it something else? As the historically male-dominated narrative of modernism continues to be reexamined, these are questions worth asking. Little is known about Torr’s early life and career. That she exhibited a precocious talent seems clear. At sixteen, she entered the Drexel Institute of Art, Science, and Industry, where she received honorable mentions for her class work and support from her professors, one of whom paid for her first year’s tuition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, to which she and fellow student Charles Demuth transferred in 1905 after Drexel terminated its art programs. By then, the need to support herself was impacting her aesthetic ambitions. Despite scholarships and aid from local benefactors, she was able to attend the academy for only five of the next eight years. Sometime between 1910 and 1912, she met Clive Weed, an academy alum who had returned to Philadelphia from Paris in 1910 to take a job as a political cartoonist at the Philadelphia Record. The two married in 1913, and for the next

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several years moved between New York and Philadelphia, as Weed landed jobs at different newspapers. In 1920, the couple joined the community of artists in Westport, Connecticut, where Torr met Arthur Dove, the modernist painter who had recently separated from his wife and whose work was being ardently championed by Stieglitz. In Dove, Torr found not only someone whose interests and artistic ambitions matched her own, but a partner who would become her most enthusiastic supporter. The two began living together in fall 1921, initially on a houseboat on Manhattan’s Harlem River and, a year later, on a forty-two-foot yawl that they sailed around Long Island Sound.1 Likely encouraged by Dove’s example, Torr explored abstraction in her art for the next seven years. The boat’s cramped quarters, combined with the expense of canvas and paint, led her to work in a scale of no more than fourteen by ten inches, in charcoal on paper or, if in oil, on either composition board or wood panels that she salvaged from the ends of grocery crates. Her compositions shared with Dove’s an overall unity of curvilinear and organic forms, but in contrast to the animated dynamism of his abstractions, Torr’s exuded a mood of quiet restraint. Sheldon Cheney reproduced one of her charcoals in his 1924 Primer of Modern Art alongside work by Georgia O’Keeffe, calling both “emotionally very moving.”2 Yet, despite whatever sense of self-possession her work evinced, Torr’s diaries chronicle her frequent struggles with self-doubt and physical illness (likely exacerbated by anxiety). Dove’s belief in her talent, however, remained unequivocal. He wrote often to Stieglitz in praise of Torr’s work and took every opportunity to interest the dealer in exhibiting it, describing her paintings as “fine things—really beautiful” and declaring on one occasion, “I may be a bit prejudiced, but think I can see straight enough to know.”3 Stieglitz was not always convinced. When Dove first showed the dealer Torr’s drawings in December 1924, he responded positively. Two years later, he judged another group of Torr’s works “very handsome, very complete— sensitive.”4 But in November 1927, Stieglitz found the work Dove showed him “too frail for the room”; it lacked “smash.”5 O’Keeffe, feeling that verdict unjust but wary of advocating for the inclusion of another woman in Stieglitz’s circle, included five of Torr’s paintings in an exhibition of emerging women artists at the recently opened, nonprofit Opportunity Gallery. The exhibition, one of only two times Torr exhibited her work publicly, did little to assuage her insecurities. And for her, as with Dove, Stieglitz’s opinion was paramount. “What you’ve decided is so,” she wrote to him that November. “I think we all felt that . . . I know I did.”6 Yet Torr rebounded, dramatically reconceiving her practice the following year as she and Dove housesat property on Pratt’s Island, Connecticut, for eight months before moving into the second floor of the Ketewomoke Yacht Club in Halesite, on the north shore of Long Island. Working in a light-filled, thirty-by-forty-foot open space with harbor views on three sides, Torr expanded the size and scale of her compositions while abandoning pure abstraction in favor of recognizable imagery that nevertheless reflected her modernist sensibilities. The artist’s working method was to sketch in pencil or charcoal outdoors, then enlarge the sketch’s basic formal design using a pantograph or magic lantern, which allowed her to avoid the “squeezed in look” of her earlier pictures.7 By infusing her paintings with soft light and narrowing her field of vision, Torr depicted the immediate world around her with a 324

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figure 146 Helen Torr, Geometric, before 1924. Charcoal on paper, 14 ½ × 11 in. Yale University Art Gallery. Gift of Eva Ingersoll Gatling, M.A., 1944, 1983.113. Photo credit: Yale University Art Gallery (public domain).

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figure 147 Helen Torr, Light House (White Cloud), 1932. Oil on canvas, 25 ¾ × 18 in. Private collection.

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figure 148 Helen Torr, Evening Sounds, ca. 1925–30. Oil on composition board, 14 ¼ × 10 in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The Hayden Collection, Charles Henry Hayden Fund, 1998.15. Photo © 2021 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. All rights reserved/ Bridgeman Images.

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gentleness and modesty that evoked the sort of intimate revelatory experiences born of solitary meditation on ordinary objects or scenes in nature. Torr and Dove married in April 1932. The following March, Dove’s advocacy of Torr’s art prevailed, and Stieglitz mounted an exhibition of the couple’s paintings at An American Place, installing Dove’s work in the gallery’s large room and Torr’s in the small one. Response to Torr’s work was positive but nothing sold, and Stieglitz’s assessment at the close of the exhibition was that her work was without “search.”8 The dismissal further eroded Torr’s confidence, but not that of Dove, who continued to advocate to Stieglitz on Torr’s behalf after the couple moved to Geneva, New York, that spring to settle the Dove family estate. Based on correspondence with the dealer, Dove and Torr expected her art to be included in Dove’s April 1935 American Place exhibition, as it had been in 1933. Only after the couple had shipped their works to New York did Stieglitz inform them that the room in which Torr had exhibited previously was being used for storage and was no longer available; moreover, he thought Torr ought to exhibit her work at another gallery that might be able to sell it. “Rather a drop,” Torr noted in her diary.9 In April 1938, Torr and Dove returned to Long Island and settled into what would be their final home: an abandoned, one-room former post office in Centerport, near Halesite. No sooner had they moved than Dove contracted pneumonia, only to suffer a severe heart attack eight months later. He remained a semi-invalid for the rest of his life, and taking care of him consumed most of Torr’s time, especially after a second heart attack left him partially paralyzed. He died on November 23, 1946. Torr stopped painting altogether after Dove’s death; her entire career had lasted less than twenty years. She became a recluse, and many who knew her forgot she had ever painted. Before her death, she instructed her sister to throw all her art away. Only at the last minute, before sending it to the Salvation Army, did Torr’s sister place a call to the nearby Heckscher Museum, whose director packed Torr’s entire extant oeuvre into the back of a station wagon and hauled it to the museum. Although Helen Torr remains less known than her peers, scholars and others who have engaged with her legacy have seen in her art what she (and influential men like Stieglitz) often could not: the union of a carefully honed modernist vocabulary with the veneration of the everyday world at its most serene and still. Torr’s art did not possess the heroic, self-expressive virility that equated with quality in American modernist circles in the early twentieth century; her work was small, intimate, moody, and lyrical instead. By joining the compositional strategies of modernism with a deference to, and unassuming affection for, the experiences of everyday life, she captured a feeling of intimate connection with the world—a feeling that is no less expressive of the human experience than those commonly associated with the resolutely masculine. NOTES 1.  Dove’s wife Florence had refused to grant him a divorce. When she died in 1929, Torr initiated divorce proceedings against Weed. 2.  Quoted in Anne Cohen DePietro, Out of the Shadows: Helen Torr, a Retrospective (Huntington, NY: Heckscher Museum of Art, 2003), 11. 328

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3.  Ibid., 21. 4.  Alfred Stieglitz, quoted in Ellen Roberts, O’Keeffe, Stettheimer, Torr, Zorach: Women Modernists in New York (West Palm Beach, FL: Norton Museum of Art, 2016), 90. 5.  DePietro, Out of the Shadows, 21. 6.  Ibid., 18. 7.  Holly Raleigh, quoted in ibid., 19. 8.  Alfred Stieglitz, quoted in ibid., 30. 9.  Ibid., 32.

FOR FURTHER READING DePietro, Anne Cohen. Out of the Shadows: Helen Torr, a Retrospective. Huntington, NY: Heckscher Museum of Art, 2003. Roberts, Ellen. O’Keeffe, Stettheimer, Torr, Zorach: Women Modernists in New York. West Palm Beach, FL: Norton Museum of Art, 2016.

HELEN TORR

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DAVID M. LUBIN

VICCI SPERRY b. 1899, New York, New York d. 1995, Los Angeles, California

Vicci Sperry: Abstract Expressionist

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Vicci Sperry was in her seventies when she produced her most visually compelling work. Small in stature, the septuagenarian wielded large paintbrushes laden with pigment, which she applied with sweeping gestures onto monumental canvases. She befriended me during this stage in her career, when I was a film student in Los Angeles. During my occasional visits to her home in Brentwood, she would serve me lemonade and admit me into her bright and spacious studio. In my early twenties, I found it astonishing that someone half a century older than me could be so full of creative energy. She has long since passed away, but the vibrancy she poured into her work has not. Unfortunately, most of that work languishes today in storage in an art warehouse, where it has remained unseen for years. In the heliotropic spirit of Sperry herself, that art yearns for the light of day. Sperry began her career as an avant-garde artist in the mid-1930s while living as a housewife in Chicago, raising two daughters, and taking classes with the German-born Chicago modernist Rudolph Weisenborn, who championed her work for inclusion in local art shows. From 1952 to 1955, she spent two weeks a month studying in New York with another German-born artist, the abstract expressionist Hans Hofmann, who was HE SECOND-GENERATION ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONIST

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renowned for his inspirational gifts as a teacher.1 Although Hofmann had the unpleasant knack of praising a female student’s work by saying she was “painting like a man,” his classes were filled with women, who found him sympathetic, fair-minded, and tremendously inspiring. She struck up lasting friendships with Hofmann and other abstract expressionists, in particular Franz Kline, whose bold, slashing brushwork made a lasting impression on her.2 But Kline, who preferred to work in black and white, was not a colorist. Willem de Kooning was, and the dazzling light and color of his painterly abstractions energized Sperry. Hofmann, Kline, and de Kooning were thus major sources of inspiration to her, but even more so were Paul Cézanne and Henri Matisse. At one time or another she owned paintings by Hofmann, Kline, Matisse, and Jackson Pollock (his last finished canvas, Search), not because she regarded herself as an art collector, but because of what these works had to teach her. Whenever one of them ceased to fulfill that function, she sold it. Sperry showed her work regularly in Chicago during the 1940s and 1950s. She participated in a 1949 group show in New York and another group show in Paris in 1956. And yet, perhaps because she was middle-aged, female, a non–New Yorker, a nondrinker, and an outside observer of the bohemian circles that boisterously gathered at Greenwich Village bars such as the Cedar Tavern, she attracted little notice or critical attention. In 1960 she relocated with her husband, an electrical engineer, from Evanston to Los Angeles, taking herself even further afield from the so-called New York School that had captured her imagination and transformed her as an artist. After a lingering illness, Sperry’s husband died in 1962. During the remainder of the decade, while continuing to paint and draw, she focused her attention on teaching and writing. These activities resulted in an inspiring and elegantly written handbook for artists and art students, The Art Experience (1969). Like Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911), Robert Henri’s The Art Spirit (1923), Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet (1929), and Hofmann’s own Search for the Real (1948), Sperry’s Art Experience is an inspirational text filled with crystalline, at times gnomic, statements about the meaning and purpose of art. She was an active member of the Christian Science Church, but the book is neither theological nor religious in nature. She mentions God only twice in ninety-three pages, quoting Matisse—“When I paint, I am with God”—and Bach, who wrote at the end of his compositions, “For the glory of God.”3 Though it never does so explicitly, The Art Experience counters the tragic view of art advanced by Mark Rothko, a first-generation abstract expressionist and founding color field painter. Rothko, who committed suicide in 1970, sought to make paintings that would bring people to tears: “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions—tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on—and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions.”4 Sperry differed from Rothko in that her definition of “the basic human emotions” also included positive mental states such as love, harmony, and happiness. An artist who suffered greatly the loss of her husband, Sperry regarded pure, unfettered joy as the summum bonum, the highest good, in her ethical system. She begins The Art VICCI SPERRY

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figure 149 Vicci Sperry, Brief Encounter in the Orange Grove, 1976. Acrylic on canvas, 6 ft. 6 in. × 7 ft. 6 in. Collection of Ann Braude.

Experience by defining art as “the joyous and spontaneous evidence of man’s capacity to express his deep feelings for beauty, order, life, and love” (15). Contrary to Rothko, who wanted his viewers to weep over the tragic nature of life, Sperry wanted her viewers to feel radiant and alive. “Poor painting,” she wrote, “keeps us low on the earth. Good painting, like good music, liberates” (15). After publishing The Art Experience, Sperry changed her way of making art. She worked from much larger canvases than she had before and embraced newly available acrylic paints to awaken in viewers the emancipatory joy that art can provide. Stendhal famously wrote that “beauty is only the promise of happiness,” but Sperry may have taken that one step further, holding that “beauty is the key to happiness.”5 It is also, she adds, “fundamental to the activity of truth. One has the power to express beauty and if one denies this, he denies himself. He denies the joy that frees the spontaneity of expression” (21). Her large paintings pay homage to Matisse in their fauvist coloring, but they also call to mind the “push-pull” color juxtapositions of her mentor Hofmann and the sprawling brush332

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figure 150 Vicci Sperry, Child with Red Face, 1966. Oil on canvas, 52 × 40 in. Private collection.

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figure 151 Vicci Sperry, Springtime Emergence, 1984. Acrylic on canvas, 80 × 50 in. Private collection.

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work of Kline. The works of hers that appeal to me most are her “pure” abstractions, which seem entirely nonreferential. Even so, they were for Sperry distillations of the human body and its motion through the outer world. Verticality in her work symbolizes the upright nature of human beings, and horizontality the horizon line where the sky meets the earth. In her characteristically mystical way, influenced no doubt by the language of Mary Baker Eddy, she writes: “The artist is at one with nature. The great lake, the great ocean, affects him with its horizontal expanse.” In Sperry’s view, we are intertwined with nature, inalienable from it: “We reflect the life force and therefore our art reflects it” (39). In some of her paintings, human figures are more specifically invoked. A recurring motif in these works is the mother-child dyad. Several of the paintings Sperry reproduced in The Art Experience suggest this theme. Child with Red Face (1966) does so specifically with its title. One discerns, amid the abstract planes of luscious color, the ghostly outlines of a mother bending to embrace a child. Intriguingly, Sperry signed the work twice, both in yellow and in red, perhaps as a way of indicating her dual identification with child and mother. In his “Women” series of paintings from a decade or so earlier, de Kooning similarly allowed a female figure to emerge from the richly sensuous, nonrepresentational brushwork that activated the surface of the canvas. In paintings such as Child with Red Face, Sperry followed de Kooning’s lead artistically, deploying a virtuosic layering and juxtaposing of colors, but without the accompanying misogyny. She showed women as mothers and protectors of the innocent, rather than, as de Kooning had, sexualized grotesques. The unashamed incorporation of a mother-child thematic in her work, inevitably calling to mind Mary Cassatt, would have distanced Sperry from the New York School even more than her move to the West Coast had. Art that smacked of sentimentality was anathema to the male tastemakers of modern art, and female abstract expressionists were expected to disavow traditional femininity in both their art and their personae. Today, however, Sperry’s use of abstraction to explore an aspect of the female condition that was vital to her seems bold and innovative, a protofeminist way of uniting her personal and professional lives. Moreover, as the current swell of interest in the early twentieth-century mystical painter Hilma af Klint attests, self-consciously spiritual art has also been rehabilitated in our cultural moment.6 The art of Vicci Sperry is thus ripe for discovery. NOTES 1.  For examples of Hofmann’s teaching, see “Excerpts from the Teaching of Hans Hofmann—Adapted from the Essays On the Aims of Art and Plastic Creation,” in Hans Hofmann, “Search for the Real” and Other Essays, ed. Sarah T. Weeks and Bartlett H. Hayes Jr. (Andover, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art, 1948), 65–74. 2.  For background on Sperry’s life, I have relied on conversations with her surviving daughter, Carol Moss, her three granddaughters, a manuscript autobiography that the family has made available to me, and the professional and family records contained in the Marjorie Braude Papers, Series III, Victoria H. Sperry Papers and Trust, 1956–2004, Boxes 22–24, archived at Harvard’s Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America.

VICCI SPERRY

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3.  Vicci Sperry, The Art Experience (Boston: André Sauret/Boston Book and Art Shop, 1969), 48. All subsequent page numbers are given in text. 4.  Mark Rothko as quoted in Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Devin-Adair, 1957), 93. Emphasis in the original. 5.  Stendhal, On Love, trans. H.B.V., under the direction of C. K. Scott-Moncrieff (New York: Universal Library, 1967), 44. 6.  The feminist religion scholar Ann Braude, one of Sperry’s granddaughters, compares her to Hilma af Klint and Hilda Rebay in “Paths to Abstraction: Spirituality in the Work of Three Women Artists,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin (Autumn/Winter 2019), https://bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/paths-to-abstraction-spirituality-inthe-work-of-three-women-artists/.

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DENNIS CARR

RICO LEBRUN b. 1900, Naples, Italy; to United States, 1924 d. 1964, Malibu, California

Rico Lebrun: In the Raw

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N THE YEARS AFTER WORLD WAR II , there was hardly a more famous

avant-garde artist from Los Angeles than Rico Lebrun. He was the toast of art exhibitions on both coasts, won awards from New York to Chicago to Rome, and was widely collected by many of the major urban art museums in the United States. A retrospective exhibition mounted by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) in 1967 traveled to six other venues, including the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. An Italian American artist who had immigrated as a young teenager, Lebrun painted most of his career in Los Angeles and became an art instructor at Chouinard Art Institute and the University of California, Los Angeles, inspiring generations of students. But following his death in 1964, his reputation began to suffer the long, slow decline felt by many abstract expressionist artists outside of the East Coast, in particular those in Los Angeles, as the history of modernism became written by the influential Clement Greenberg and other metropolitan scribes and the center of gravity shifted to New York.1 As with fellow artists like Hyman Bloom and Leonard Baskin, Lebrun’s often gloomy subject matter and brash aesthetic style gradually fell out of favor with curators and audiences. His dark expositions of 337

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humanity were decidedly harder to look at than the colorful and gestural or hard-edged abstractions of the “New York School” that overtook the scene by mid-century. Yet Lebrun’s deeply psychological and emotional works feel especially resonant today, just as they had for the post–World War II generation coming to grips with a period of immense human suffering and staggering loss. More importantly for Los Angeles, Lebrun became a guiding force among the first generation of abstract expressionist artists who were challenging traditional notions of painting and establishing a new path on the West Coast. Exemplary of Lebrun’s early works done in the mid-1940s is his abstract Vertical Composition from 1945. The painting resulted from solitary walks he took in the Santa Ynez Valley north of Santa Barbara while an artist-in-residence at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. Staying at the ranch owned by fellow artist and former student Channing Peake, he created a series of paintings depicting farm implements abandoned in the fields or melted in brush fires, burnt-out tractors, charred stumps, and upended axles and wheels—as a contemporary source describes them, “their hubs like glaring eyes, the spokes spinning in flame or stationary like petrified sunflowers.”2 The canvases are quickly painted, repeatedly worked and reworked in his characteristic way. He splattered, dripped, and flung paint, building up the surface and then scraping it down. The paintings shift the perspective of the viewer, making the commonplace or the discarded grand and imposing, ennobled in its degraded state. As Lebrun himself recalled, this series was consequential in his career, allowing him to explore space and form in new ways. “The expression,” he wrote, “was the structure; the interval, the span, was the physiognomy and the countenance.” In an almost hallucinatory manner, he described the machinery in these paintings as taking on animalistic forms: “The open works of the tractor were organs with the clangor of orange blood. . . . The seeding and planting machines were made in the likeness of the locust and the mantis—savage, alert, predatory. The disk harrows were vertebrate; so was the bone-white, upright structure of the axle and wheel.”3 One cannot help but see in these paintings echoes of the horrors of World War II, but they also feel eerily resonant today when fire-ravaged landscapes in California have become a visceral reminder of loss and of a world beset by wrenching, if slow and inexorable, change. Lebrun is perhaps best known for his monumental triptych The Crucifixion, now at Syracuse University, which premiered at LACMA and the de Young Museum in San Francisco before its New York debut at the Museum of Modern Art in 1951. He famously created more than two hundred oil paintings and preparatory drawings as part of an iterative process in which he relentlessly explored the crucifixion theme. One work from this series, Sleeping Soldier (1950, LACMA), is typical of the mural and related works in its somber, grayed palette and contorted figuration. This large canvas excerpts a section of the mural focused on the Roman soldiers who attended Jesus in his final hours. The hulking, bent-over form appears beset by the weight of this act, the body exhausted and distorted under the heavy, carapacelike armor. The composition shows Lebrun’s characteristic cubo-expressionist style, dark and earthy in its coloration, more sketch-like than traditional painting. Known as a 338

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figure 152 Rico Lebrun, Vertical Composition, 1945. Oil on canvas, 70 × 32 in. Collection of Sandra and Bram Dijkstra. Courtesy of the Huntington Art Museum, San Marino, California.

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figure 153 Rico Lebrun, Genesis, 1960. Mixed media on concrete, 25 × 20 ft. Frary Dining Hall, Pomona College, Claremont, California. Photo provided by Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons Share Alike 3.0 License.

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draftsman of dazzling technical ability, Lebrun’s compositions were steeped in Scripture, history, and philosophy, and he steadfastly held to his interest in figuration and humanism throughout his career, perhaps to the detriment of his reputation among some critics. Following a stint as a fellow at the American Academy in Rome, encouraged by a commission from Peter Selz at Pomona College, Lebrun returned to California to paint a monumental outdoor mural, Genesis, completed in 1960. It appears on the same building in which José Clemente Orozco had painted his famous Prometheus mural thirty years earlier. Lebrun labored intensively on the project, which features scenes from the Old Testament. The composition and scale of the mural were inspired in part by Lebrun’s extended stay in Mexico in the early 1950s, where he studied the works of the Mexican muralists Orozco, Diego Rivera, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Some of the figures were drawn from photographs of the concentration camp at Buchenwald that were first published soon after the camp’s liberation in April 1945. He was troubled by the images and embarked on a series of paintings in the mid1950s, including Buchenwald Pit (1956, The Jewish Museum) and Buchenwald Cart (1955, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts). He wrote of the series: “I had to find out for myself that pain has a geometry of its own; and that my being, through a revulsion against all tolerable and manageable skill, wanted to speak out in a single shout.”4 Contemporary critics sometimes labeled Lebrun’s work as overwrought or too concerned with negativity and decay. To answer this charge, the artist once responded: “I am not in love with decay. But I am in love with an object that has experienced some kind of existence. Perhaps in my case it has to be a tragic existence.” He concluded that “if we artists are to survive this period at all—we will survive as spokesmen, never again as entertainers.”5 Herein lies the contradiction in Lebrun’s legacy and those of other artists whose challenging compositions and disturbing subject matter provoke rather than reaffirm. While many of Lebrun’s works, each equally disturbing in its own way, are in museum collections, rarely have they been shown together; his most recent retrospective was organized by LACMA in 1967, three years after his death. Occasional efforts have been made since then to close this gap, the most notable being Lebrun’s inclusion in a reappraisal of Los Angeles abstract expressionist artists, part of the Getty Foundation’s “Pacific Standard Time” initiative in 2011–12; Lebrun has also appeared in a number of smaller gallery shows. Nevertheless, art critics, such as the Los Angeles Times’s Christopher Knight, have lamented how Lebrun, who in his lifetime was considered among the leading artists of his generation, is often neglected in retrospective surveys of the era.6 LACMA, for instance, did not acquire its first major Lebrun painting until 2019. Without a foundation to look after his legacy, Lebrun’s works have fallen into obscurity and—with the exception of his Genesis mural—are not often found on public view. In the words of Bram Dijkstra, professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, Lebrun is one of the most unjustly neglected artists of the postwar era. As Lebrun told a fellow artist and former student, William Ptaszynski, in 1959: “Objects, like onions, should make you weep when you peel them. And how many skins and shells you can peel off that onion is up to you.”7 RICO LEBRUN

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NOTES The author is grateful to Sandy and Bram Dijkstra, John Seed, Susan Ehrlich, and Lily Allen for their kind assistance with this article. 1.  Recent attempts to recover the history of abstract expressionist artists in Los Angeles include Michael Duncan, L.A. Raw: Abject Expressionism in Los Angeles, 1945–1980, from Rico Lebrun to Paul McCarthy (Pasadena: Pasadena Museum of California Art, 2012). 2.  Selden Rodman, “The ‘Crucifixion’ of Rico Lebrun,” Perspectives USA 15 (Spring 1956): 74. 3.  Rico Lebrun, Drawings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 10. 4.  Quoted in Peter Selz, New Images of Man (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1958), 99. 5.  Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Devin-Adair, 1957), 34–35. 6.  Christopher Knight, “Pacific Standard Time: Open Your Eyes to John McLaughlin,” Los Angeles Times, October 2, 2011. 7.  James Renner and David Lebrun, eds., In the Meridian of the Heart: Selected Letters of Rico Lebrun (Boston: David R. Godine, 2000), 33.

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PATRICIA JUNKER

EDWARD HAGEDORN b. 1902, San Francisco, California d. 1982, Berkeley, California

Edward Hagedorn: California Nightmares

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of the most innovative artists of his place and time—San Francisco in the 1920s and 1930s. But today, his would be just another curious name in the local art columns were it not for the Fates, who in 1983 directed a dozen cardboard boxes, comprising the bulk of Hagedorn’s artistic output, into the hands of San Francisco art dealers Stuart and Beverly Denenberg. The boxes contained luminous, boldly graphic watercolors; ink drawings made with a fine pen or a loaded brush; and elegant intaglio, woodcut, and linocut prints along with painterly monotypes. Hagedorn had mastered every technique that can be applied to paper. The boxes of art were the last of Hagedorn’s possessions, and they might easily have been discarded in the cleanup of the artist’s jam-packed Berkeley home, where he died, alone and forgotten, in December 1982. The Denenbergs have described their first encounters with the work in the boxes as a puzzlement akin to that of the storied blind men trying to comprehend an elephant, when each can only grasp this or that part of the monumental beast without seeing the whole. For a long time, it was difficult for the Denenbergs to map the contours of Hagedorn’s various and outsized artistic gifts. The work spanned just two decades, the early years of Hagedorn’s long life. Yet there were figure drawings akin to Rodin or DWARD HAGEDORN WAS ONE

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Matisse; riveting images of the horrors of war, in etchings and drypoints, à la Goya; and strange black coastal skyscapes that were unlike anything by his contemporaries. I was invited to see the work in 1993, when I was embarking on a study of Bay Area landscape art of Hagedorn’s period for a monumental survey exhibition planned for the M. H. de Young Memorial Museum. I will never forget that first encounter. The Denenbergs spread the big sheets out, and we considered the panorama before us. Hagedorn’s landscapes were darker than anything I had seen—California with the lights off. The familiar terrain of headlands and shoreline was there, with exaggerations and extrapolations, but these were essentially skyscapes of overwhelming blackness, illuminated in this or that painting by singular celestial or terrestrial events—lightning bolts worthy of the end of the world; comets appearing as signs from Nature almighty; fiery blasts from a cleaving Earth; or strange, glowing thought-forms that suggested figments of erotic dreams. It seemed to me that he had created a timescape, too, for Hagedorn had dated many of the paintings quite specifically— August 1935 or February 1936, and so on. Hagedorn was once famous. For two decades, from 1925 through the war years, he regularly exhibited in the seasonal exhibitions of the San Francisco Art Association and the various print clubs, and he was given any number of solo exhibitions at San Francisco’s most progressive galleries. He got a lot of press. Actually, Hagedorn earned overnight fame just out of art school in May 1925, when his unconventional drawing of a female nude, hanging in the Art Association spring show, was removed as obscene. In 1926 he was censored again. Cynics decried the wretchedness of his disjointed figures, emaciated and broken, while others admired Hagedorn’s brazen unconventionality, economy of means, and extraordinarily beautiful line and brushwork. These expressionistic nudes soon brought the fledgling Hagedorn to the attention of a legendary impresario of modern art, the German Emilie Esther Scheyer, known as Galka. Scheyer arrived in San Francisco in 1925, having traveled there to promote the radical artists she knew in Germany, the Blue Four—Wassily Kandinsky, Alexei Jawlensky, Lionel Feininger, and Paul Klee. Scheyer might have made Hagedorn an international sensation, for she wanted him to join her stable. But Hagedorn refused. Hagedorn deserves a major place in any retrospective of American modernism as one of the earliest to channel German expressionism. He must have absorbed the work Scheyer was exhibiting in the San Francisco and Oakland museums. Quite possibly he read Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art or other writings of the modern mystics who were so important to the Munich-based abstract art pioneers. He was America’s Jawlensky or Emile Nolde, some have written, often attributing his sensibilities to a particular cultural affinity with the Munich-based artists, an innate German-ness on Hagedorn’s part. Yet, more to the point, Hagedorn was a Californian, and California would unleash his imagination. His German grandfather had settled in San Francisco in 1868, and the family put down roots. Edward was raised not by Hagedorns but by his Irish Catholic maiden aunts.1 It bears noting that Hagedorn was four years old in 1906, when San Francisco was wracked by earthquake and fire; he would have witnessed the tragedy and the city’s transfor344

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figure 154 Edward Hagedorn, Green Mountains, Pale Lightning, August 1935. Ink, watercolor, and graphite on paper, 28 ⁵/₈ × 22 ⁵/₈ in. Courtesy of Denenberg Fine Arts Inc., West Hollywood, California.

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figure 155 Edward Hagedorn, Cobalt Mountains, Green Sea, February 1936. Ink, watercolor, and graphite on paper, 22 ¾ × 28 ⁵/₈ in. Courtesy of Denenberg Fine Arts Inc., West Hollywood, California.

mation up close from the duplex on Filmore Street where his aunts settled in the aftermath. Hagedorn did not go abroad to study art. He was three years out of Catholic high school when he enrolled in 1923 at the California School of the Fine Arts. He studied there for two years, taking a full complement of courses under San Francisco’s old guard—antique painting, life painting and drawing, mural painting, and commercial art. His favorites were the life classes taught by the conservative painter Lee Randolph; he progressed from a grade of “D” in life painting in his first term to winning second prize in life drawing at the end of his second year.2 Figure drawings would be his first submissions to the Art Association shows, and he would continue in this vein almost exclusively for the next decade. Hagedorn surprised and confounded the critics when he unveiled a group of searing landscapes and skyscapes in 1938. The black-ink and watercolor paintings were first shown in June 1938 at the Vera Jones Bright Gallery. “Where these were done it would be hard to say,” wrote a puzzled though admiring Alfred Frankenstein, the Chronicle’s esteemed art and music critic. “They seem to reflect some brilliant, but grim and extreme land of jagged capes and boiling sea such as Sibelius might celebrate in a tone poem.”3 Three months later, another, similar group—monochromes this time—was shown at the de Young Museum. Heinz 346

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figure 156 Edward Hagedorn, The Rainbow, ca. 1938. Linoleum cut on paper, 20 ¼ × 29 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gift of Stuart and Beverly Denenberg, 1994.83.2.

Berggruen, the German art collector, then in San Francisco and writing for the Chronicle, was succinct in his description of the artist’s “heavy nightmares in black and white”: Hagedorn had conjured “The End of the World.”4 So, where did these works come from—the fearsome capes and roiled seas, the thunderclaps and erupting volcanoes, and (in a linocut) one of Hagedorn’s most haunting San Francisco images from these dark years, the “rainbow” of death that mocks a fragile city? Hagedorn had once spoken of an obsession with the writings of occultists and mystics, but he did not need these to awaken his imagination to Nature’s dark soul, for he had seen it himself in 1906, and he could still feel it when the ground shook. This was the Pacific Ring of Fire, and the ring of fire was the perfect metaphor for what must have seemed to San Franciscans in the 1930s to be the coming apocalypse. Their distresses were the fears of world war and economic despair, certainly, but they were also the terrifying reality of bloody labor riots, insidious pestilence, and the cruelty of vigilantism and lynchings in a city of immigrants. Month after month, Hagedorn marked these times in his city in his own metaphorical way. Hagedorn’s night fevers seem to have ended around 1940. He continued to draw and exhibit female nudes; one of his last exhibitions of drawings was held at San Francisco’s famed EDWARD HAGEDORN

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City Lights bookstore in July 1961. His career essentially ended where it had started, with endless and always masterly explorations of line in the contours of the female form. The departure that Hagedorn’s art took in the 1930s was somehow forgotten. Hagedorn’s posthumous reputation, however, will surely be based in no small measure on the associations that his particular California timescape continues to accrue. His grim San Francisco “rainbow” of the 1930s seems a fitting emblem now of the city that tragically was the epicenter of the AIDS epidemic. His nightmares painted in another time of pestilence have cogency as COVID fears trouble our sleep. And as I write this, California burns, its skies turned black and gold. Looking back on Hagedorn’s art and its rediscovery, I can see two stories: the first is how Hagedorn’s art came to us, the second how we came to it. NOTES 1.  Ancestry.com, United States Federal Census, San Francisco, California, for 1880, 1900, 1920 [databases online]. Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations Inc., 2004. 2.  Edward Hagedorn Registration Cards, California School of the Fine Arts, now the San Francisco Art Institute. I am grateful to José de Los Reyes, Director of Institutional Research and Registrar, for providing these records. 3.  Alfred Frankenstein, “A Week of New and Important Exhibitions,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 26, 1938, 58. 4.  Heinz Berggruen, “Around the Galleries,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 18, 1938, 52.

FOR FURTHER READING Denenberg, Stuart, and Beverly Denenberg, eds. Edward Hagedorn, California Modernist: Restlessness and Restraint. West Hollywood, CA: Denenberg Fine Arts, 2009. Edward Hagedorn. Berkeley: University Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, 1996. Karlstrom, Paul J., ed. On the Edge of America: California Modernist Art, 1900–1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Nash, Stephen, ed. Facing Eden: 100 Years of Landscape Art in the Bay Area. Berkeley: University of California Press for the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1995.

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MARK A. WHITE

OLINKA HRDY b. 1902, Prague, Oklahoma d. 1987, Prague, Oklahoma

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HE NAME OLINKA HRDY ,

though certainly memorable, will register today with few art historians and even fewer Americans at large, yet her extant work reveals an audaciously experimental sensibility, especially considering she came of age artistically not in New York City or Chicago but in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In her most productive period of the 1920s and 1930s, she drew from art deco ornament, cubism, constructivism, and Bauhaus abstraction when few other American artists were following the same path. Although she was born and died in the Czech immigrant community of Prague (pronounced “Prayg” with a decidedly Oklahoman flavor), she spent much of her career outside the state in search of the opportunities absent at home. During her initial study at the University of Oklahoma (OU) from 1923 to 1928, she painted numerous murals across campus and the city of Norman, working in a largely representational style. Her facility attracted the attention of an emerging architect, Bruce Goff, who offered to hire Hrdy to design and execute a suite of nine murals for the home and conservatory of Patti Adams Shriner in Tulsa. Goff ’s design for the so-called Riverside Studio expressed his enthusiasm for the architecture of Erich Mendelsohn and his familiarity with Le Corbusier. The philosophical influence of Claude Bragdon’s 349

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figure 157 Olinka Hrdy, Studies for Tulsa Riverside Studio Murals, 1928–29. Watercolor. Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, The University of Oklahoma, Norman. Gift of the artist, 1966.

1918 book Architecture and Democracy encouraged Goff to envision architecture as “frozen music” and prompted the young architect to conceive of the Riverside Studio as a Gesamtkunstwerk. Hrdy’s mural cycle would help unify that vision and soon led her to realize that Goff’s synesthetic thought “was so modern that I had to make a turn around.” Although the original cycle is no longer extant, Hrdy’s watercolors provide a compelling indication of the intensity and innovation of the finished murals. Hrdy’s stylistic reinvention relied on the limited instruction she had received on cubism and futurism at OU. She expanded her modernist vocabulary by studying the latest art, fashion, and design in art journals and popular periodicals such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and by examining the art deco ornament of the new skyscrapers of downtown Tulsa. Hrdy fashioned a stylistic language from the various modernist idioms that consciously blurs the distinctions between art and design as well as the independent arts. In turn, she began her cycle with Symphony of the Arts (Painting, Architecture, Music, and Dance), located in the foyer between the two portals to the recital hall. Hrdy enshrined the dancer at center in an architectonic mandorla replete with fortes and naturals and a brilliant palette of primaries and secondaries evocative of the modern composers Goff appreciated: Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky, and Arnold Schönberg. Symphony of the Arts established the theme, format, and aesthetic approach for the remaining eight murals in the recital hall, which constitute a survey of various musical genres: Modern American, Vocal, Piano, String, Symphonic, Primitive, Choral, and Future Music. At the risk of disregarding the artistic contributions of the remaining cycle, Modern American Music is arguably the most compelling because of the disagreement between Hrdy and Shriner over its subject. Hrdy had intended the mural to celebrate jazz, a genre that her patron apparently disliked. Although the final title of the mural was sufficiently ambiguous to placate Shriner, Hrdy retaliated by encoding the word “JAZZ” in the grid of triangles in the lower left corner of the finished mural. Hrdy’s subversive sense of humor notwithstanding, the anecdote reveals 350

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figure 158 Olinka Hrdy, Cartoon for the Tulsa Convention Hall Curtain, ca. 1930. Tempera on paper, 11 × 25 in. Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, The University of Oklahoma, Norman. Gift of the artist, 1966. Photo © Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art/Bridgeman Images.

that even during the height of the Jazz Age, there were still those disdainful of the “devil’s music.” The stakes were perhaps higher in Tulsa, considering that many of the city’s jazz clubs were in the African American community of Greenwood, which was still rebuilding after the Tulsa race massacre of May 31 and June 1, 1921. In that respect, Hrdy’s reference to jazz may have been more than just a flapper’s veneration of the genre or a secretive jab at her patron. Hrdy completed the Riverside Studio murals on May 3, 1929, and Goff praised the cycle as “among the first adventures in abstract decoration in America.” Even Frank Lloyd Wright, whom Hrdy worked for briefly in 1933, found “something good” in the Riverside Studio murals, a generous compliment from a man infamously reticent to praise anything that was not his. The cycle set Hrdy on a path of experimentation, and she joined Goff again for the renovation of the Tulsa Convention Hall in early 1930. Goff redecorated the ceiling in a geometric pattern of gold and green and added forty-five lighting fixtures composed of green and frosted glass. Hrdy followed with the design for the fifty-foot-long stage curtain, which survives today only in the form of her watercolor study. She employed a similar approach to geometric form in the Convention Hall curtain, but in a spirit less obviously derived from art deco. Hrdy described the checkered grids, rippling verticals, and colorful horizontal bands as “mechanical” in character, and the forms suggest a growing familiarity with constructivism and Bauhaus abstraction. Information on either style would have been difficult to come by in the United States in 1930, apart from the promotional efforts of Katherine Dreier’s Société Anonyme in New York City; nevertheless, the Convention Hall curtain bears comparison to the works of Josef or Anni Albers or of Gunta Stölzl. Whether Hrdy might have seen their work in reproduction remains unclear, yet it is also possible that she drew inspiration from traditional Czech weaving. A 1936 painting, appropriately titled Weaving (Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, Norman), explores the commonalities between modernist abstraction and geometric composition of Czech textiles. OLINKA HRDY

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figure 159 Olinka Hrdy, Design (Exposition Park), or A Mysterious Shadow on Five Forms, 1934. Oil on canvas, 96 × 60 in. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. U.S. Department of the Treasury, Public Works of Art Project, Washington, D.C., permanent loan. Digital image © 2021 Museum Associates/LACMA; licensed by Art Resource, New York.

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Following the completion of the Convention Hall curtain, Hrdy decided to seek further education in New York City, where, in 1931, she enrolled in the Master Institute of the Roerich Museum for classes under Howard Giles, the institute’s primary instructor. Hrdy credited Giles with her introduction to “dynamic symmetry,” a compositional system invented by Jay Hambidge. When her education at the Master Institute concluded in 1933, she approached Frank Lloyd Wright, whom she had met in Tulsa in 1929, with the hope of teaching at Taliesin. She stayed there only a few months but remained on good terms with Wright. The geometric nature of both dynamic symmetry and Wright’s ornament of the period shaped Hrdy’s exploration of geometric abstraction. Hrdy landed in Los Angeles after leaving Taliesin and qualified for relief through the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), completing a mural, A Mysterious Shadow on Five Forms, that the PWAP gave to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in May 1934. As its title suggests, the mural investigates light, shadow, and transparency through a geometric lattice of multiple planes, the intersections of which reveal subtle shifts in color. She also composed a pattern of circles in gold leaf to reflect ambient light. An abstracted cup, barely discernible at center, provides the anchor for Hrdy’s formal investigations, but her real subject is the spatial and temporal dynamics of light and shadow through a formal approach that recalls the work of László Moholy-Nagy. Hrdy painted less after the 1930s and pursued a career in industrial design until her retirement. Although her output was not large, she produced daringly modernist work without the advantage of a trip to Europe or the influence of an impassioned impresario like Alfred Stieglitz. In an age when the opportunities for women artists were fewer than they should have been, Hrdy chose not to follow the market. She deviated from the norm and ultimately sacrificed broader acceptance, but her career offers a wonderful example of just how progressive the provinces can be. FOR FURTHER READING White, Mark Andrew. Oklahoma Moderne: The Art and Design of Olinka Hrdy. Norman, Oklahoma: Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, 2007.

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PATRICIA MCDONNELL

CHARLES BIEDERMAN b. 1906, Cleveland, Ohio d. 2004, Red Wing, Minnesota

Nature’s Reality: Abstraction and Modernist Charles Biederman

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be the least known of our wellknown artists,” wrote the legendary curator Jan van der Marck in the 1976 retrospective catalogue on the artist.1 Biederman is an artist whose caliber and serious intellect far exceed his recognition. He engineered this neglect by his stubborn character and independence. The isolation he chose, and the dogged purpose he sustained, nonetheless enabled an artistic evolution that makes him a truly remarkable artist. Starting as a painter, Biederman ended as a sculptor of compelling reliefs. “New art” was the final term he used for his unique creations. They are arresting—within the category of artwork that, when viewed, makes the spine tingle for even the most experienced connoisseur. They involve a sophisticated syncopation of vibrant color, composition of form, and tangle of distinct elements. Crafted in meticulously painted aluminum, a signature work by Biederman starts with an easel-size field of bold and highly saturated color. Think songbird yellow, cerise red, or azure blue. Projecting from this background plane on the wall, Biederman attaches small metal bits as geometric elements in contrasting hues. The rectangles and squares form idiosyncratic patterns—a cadence of color, rhythm, geometry. They are perpendicular as well as HARLES BIEDERMAN MAY WELL

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parallel to the background, while a few forms cant at an angle. Some elements cluster, while others fan out. The arrangements and unexpected juxtapositions pulse and quiver. The whole is activated by the shifting vantage point of the viewer and changing shadow of the discrete parts. The collective effect is absorbing, even electrifying. From this description, it is clear that Biederman achieved exceptional mastery in crafting his own distinctive language and art. As a modernist, he transitioned through many modes to arrive at his singular voice. As he evolved from his traditional training through various stylistic phases, Biederman excelled at each stage with an uncommon authority and rigor. From early academic training to cubism and surrealism, through biomorphic abstraction to constructivist assemblage, Biederman was a cat always landing on his feet with élan. Biederman took part in the modernist project, and he was a fierce iconoclast within the ranks. Several generations of modern artists—starting in the late decades of the nineteenth century and continuing into the middle decades of the twentieth—rebelled against the restrictive traditions of established art making. They pushed hard for radical change, and the struggle to overcome the weight of centuries-old practice required a passionate stridency. The forceful manifesto that voiced unwavering certainty is a hallmark of this ethos. And the ambitious Biederman was a model modernist. Biederman, who was born in Cleveland to a Czech immigrant family, moved to Chicago in 1926 and worked as a commercial designer before training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1934 he moved to New York, where he quickly entered avant-garde circles with artists Ilya Bolotowsky, Burgoyne Diller, George L. K. Morris, Charles Shaw, and others. In this milieu, he was able to see the Whitney Museum of American Art’s landmark exhibition Abstract Painting in America in 1935 and the Museum of Modern Art’s Cubism and Abstract Art the following year. Both inspired emerging American abstract artists like Biederman, still finding their footing in—and the audience for—a new artistic vocabulary. Pierre Matisse Gallery mounted a one-person show for Biederman in March 1936, and he was included in Five Contemporary Concretionists: Biederman, Calder, Ferren, Morris, Shaw, a show in New York that later traveled to Paris and London. Leading New York art critic Henry McBride noted in a review of the Matisse Gallery show that Biederman “has vigor and courage, and his future work will be looked for with interest.”2 Following the call so many American artists felt in the interwar years, Biederman traveled to Paris in October 1936. He arrived just in time to enjoy the Five Contemporary Concretionists exhibition on view at Galerie Pierre. Again, he quickly found his way to connections and friendships with kindred avant-garde artists. He rubbed elbows and had studio visits with Jean Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Joan Miró, Piet Mondrian, Antoine Pevsner, and others. Years later, he talked with particular fondness about relationships with Fernand Léger and Alberto Giacometti. He attended one of Alexander Calder’s now legendary studio performances of Circus. With clear purpose to push art into new terrain, an allergy to mendacious posturing, and a good nose for weak argument, Biederman grew disenchanted with the Paris art scene. After eight months he returned to New York, convinced that the French modern artists were CHARLES BIEDERMAN

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figure 160 Charles J. Biederman, Cubist Self-Portrait, Chicago, January 1932, 1932. Oil on canvas, 39 ¹/₈ × 24 ³/₈ in. Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Biederman Archive. Gift of Charles J. Biederman, 2015.28.6.

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figure 161 Charles J. Biederman, Untitled, New York, June 1936, 1936. Oil on canvas, 77 × 53 in. Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Biederman Archive. Gift of Charles J. Biederman, 2015.28.15.

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feeble and burdened by their past. New York and the United States, he boasted, were more fertile for new artistic expression. Based in New York from 1937 to 1940 and in Chicago from 1940 to 1941, he traveled between the two cities often, as well as to Minnesota, the residence of his major benefactors, John and Eugenie Anderson. He married Mary Moore, Eugenie’s sister, in December 1941 and moved to Red Wing, Minnesota, shortly after. There, a tremendously fruitful chapter for his artistic advance unfolded. Having found reasonable success in capitals of the art world, Biederman turned his back on these urban centers. He fits the mold of the loner iconoclast—such figures as Paul Cézanne, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Glenn Gould come to mind. Biederman was always pugnacious. Isolation allowed him to focus his energy and craft new work of exquisite formal power as well as theoretical heft. In rural Minnesota, he produced eleven books and countless journal essays. He carried on a frequent correspondence with theoretical physicist David Bohm, published in 2014.3 Biederman pursued the life of the mind alongside his dedication to the craft of his art. At 696 pages, the artist’s first book, Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge (1948), was considered the most decisive expression of his ideas. As the title suggests, Biederman saw an evolutionary progression in modern art’s development, a sequence he starts with French impressionism. This circle of artists was the first, Biederman asserts, to create a language of mark-making on the canvas that evokes and parallels the artist’s sensory experience of nature. Without mentioning the nineteenth-century German aesthetic theorists Konrad Fiedler and Adolf Hildebrand—who first advocated pictorial formalism as the guiding force and measure for works of art—Biederman called for an art that sheds concern for verisimilitude, narrative, moral content, or cultural expression and pursues pure artistic interest.4 While Monet starts the historical advance for Biederman, he prized Cézanne as the ideal whom all subsequent artists must follow—not should, but must, according to Biederman. In this reverence for Cézanne, Biederman followed a crush of modern artists, from Maurice Denis to Marsden Hartley. Biederman embraced and endorsed Cézanne because he creatively translated his perceptual experience in nature onto canvases that pulse and flex with a corollary, though independent, visual formulation. Nature seeds and inspires, but it doesn’t dictate. As Cézanne noted, “I believe in the logical development of what we see and feel through the study of nature. . . . Art is a harmony parallel to nature.”5 For Biederman, the impulse to patiently observe and study nature—to then translate that fleeting perceptual experience to art—charts something existential. He called the focus of his study the “structural process level” of nature. He explained that “to achieve the highest degree of ‘reality’ possible for new art . . . it was necessary that it be as similar in structure as possible to the structure of nature’s reality process.”6 As I’ve stated elsewhere, “Cézanne’s project put the continual, arduous search to understand and articulate ‘reality’ at the heart of art, a reality understood through the filter of nature. For Biederman, there could be no greater calling.”7 Biederman possessed a fascinating mind, one that could craft the nuanced and sophisticated constellation of thought to undergird his particular and eloquent visual production. Biederman’s reliefs from the late 1940s through the late 1990s carry this deeper 358

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figure 162 Charles J. Biederman, #24 Constable, 1977–79. Painted aluminum, 41 ½ × 33 ¹/₈ × 12 in. Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Biederman Archive. Gift of Charles J. Biederman, 2015.28.29.

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philosophical content. They can be visually mesmerizing, while they also convey refined existential comment. Biederman shunned the art world in his hermetic life in Minnesota. Nonetheless, the larger world did recognize his achievement. During his lifetime, he had museum retrospectives in Minneapolis and London. The primary publication on constructivist theory includes an extended excerpt from Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge.8 The University of Minnesota’s Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum added his complete life’s work to the permanent collection during my tenure as curator at the museum. And yet, in the words of Jan van der Marck, “it is rare indeed to encounter somebody who has actually seen Biederman’s work. And when one does, it’s like having located a kindred soul and discovered that one is not alone in being struck and profoundly moved by those truly spectacular reliefs.”9 Agreed, fellow Biederman fan, agreed! NOTES 1.  Jan van der Marck, Charles Biederman: A Retrospective (Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1976), 57. 2.  Henry McBride, “Abstraction Beguiles the Critics,” Art Digest 10 (March 15, 1936): 17. As quoted in Susan C. Larsen, “Charles Biederman and American Abstract Modernism,” in Susan C. Larsen and Patricia McDonnell, Charles Biederman (Minneapolis: Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, 2003), 29. 3.  Paavo Pylkkänen, ed., Bohm-Biederman Correspondence: Creativity in Art and Science (New York: Routledge, 2014). 4.  Charles Biederman, “Towards a New Content,” in Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge (Red Wing, MN: privately published, 1948), 261–277. 5.  Cézanne as quoted in Françoise Cachin et al., Cézanne (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1996), 18. 6.  Biederman, Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge, 388. 7.  Patricia McDonnell, “Charles Biederman: A Tribute to the Life of the Mind,” in Larsen and McDonnell, Charles Biederman, 53. 8.  Stephen Bann, ed., The Tradition of Constructivism (New York: Routledge, 1990). 9.  Van der Marck, Charles Biederman: A Retrospective, 57.

FOR FURTHER READING Larsen, Susan C., and Neil Juhl Larsen. Charles Biederman. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2011. Larsen, Susan C., and Patricia McDonnell. Charles Biederman. Minneapolis, MN: Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, 2003. van der Marck, Jan. “Landscapes by Whatever Name.” In Charles Biederman: A Retrospective. Minneapolis, MN: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 1976.

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ILENE SUSAN FORT

VERA BERDICH b. 1915, Cicero, Illinois d. 2003, Chicago, Illinois

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with two prints by Vera Berdich. Entering Printworks, a gallery in Chicago, I asked the staff if they had any works by women that appeared surrealistic or were inspired by the Alice in Wonderland novels. Out came two examples by Berdich. Their beauty and haunting qualities intrigued me, and in 2018, I returned to the city to study her holdings at the Art Institute of Chicago. Examining her prints is a great challenge, a visual puzzle to discern. She created her mature works on a large scale, combining multiple techniques in a single example, layering and building crowded and complex compositions, with individual objects and groupings overlapping one another, merging, transforming, and disappearing. My examination of her prints proceeded slowly, and I was able to study only a few examples each day, as I took numerous notes with multitudes of details. The experience was well worth the effort. Berdich’s prints demonstrate what I have often explained to collectors: the best artwork is one that draws you back repeatedly and one you never tire of experiencing, because you always discover new elements. One of the most significant experimental American artists of the twentieth century, Berdich ranks as a master printmaker. Her technical innovations and mysterious iconography enabled her to create some of EARS AGO, I HAD A CHANCE ENCOUNTER

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the most fantastic images of the post–World War II era. Figuration dominates in her work, as it did in much of the art created in Chicago, where she lived and worked her entire career. Around 1937, she began attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), supporting herself as a photo retoucher and, during the war, as a draftsman for the American Steel Company; both experiences contributed to her skills in drawing and color. Under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration, she first encountered printmaking at Hull House. In 1946 she participated in Vanguard, a recently formed, national graphic arts group that promoted innovative approaches, and she exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum with Samuel W. Hayter, Kurt Seligman, Anne Ryan, and other members. In 1947, a year after graduating from SAIC, she was hired to teach at her alma mater. She became a frequent exhibitor, first in local and regional annuals, then nationally. The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, was the first foreign institution to acquire her art when she began participating in international displays in 1959. From 1950 through the early 1980s, she would be accorded awards, solo exhibitions, and fellowships throughout the country, but primarily in the Midwest. Berdich was one of the independent women who played a crucial role in American printmaking during the third quarter of the twentieth century. Yet her focus on this medium, as well as her gender and residence in America’s Second City, hampered her reputation. Today she is barely known. Berdich’s attraction to printmaking was immediate and intuitive. She viewed etching as a medium for creativity, not reproduction. Her desire to learn established printmaking procedures and then personalize them was voracious. Early in her career she became a frequent visitor to the Prints and Drawings gallery and the examination room of the Art Institute, carefully studying examples from the museum’s enormous collection and chatting with the curators about what she discerned. Harold Joachim, the esteemed head of that department, considered her a “rare” artist.1 She traveled to Europe in 1952, and it was probably on this trip that she compiled extensive notes during visits to notable printmakers in France and Italy. For the next two decades, she pursued an ever-expanding repertoire of techniques—reviving, exploring, and transforming earlier processes, such as à la poupée (color print made through multiple re-inkings of a single plate and numerous overprintings) and cliché-verre (drawing on glass that is replicated by the action of light through the glass onto photo-sensitive paper), while updating traditional modes of expression through the incorporation and manipulation of photographs, photograms, x-rays, and dot screen matrix, thereby inventing her own personal visual language. As early as 1951, Berdich began considering the incorporation of photographic images in her etchings. As she explained, I had in mind a creative incorporation of the image with other etching techniques. I had in mind some of the experiments by the surrealists and their early experiment in collage and montage; they used the photo image with a great deal of imagination taking it out of context or making interesting composites. . . . At first I made use of some of the images photo engraved on commercial plates, altering the image to suit my ideas, but after a little research, I was able to find a photo sensitized solution put out by Kodak and their auto screen (dot screen) and do the photographing on the plate myself.2

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figure 163 Vera Berdich, The Masked Ball, 1959. Color etching and aquatint on cream wove paper, image/print 10 ¹/₁₆ × 20 ¹¹/₁₆ in. The Art Institute of Chicago. Gift of Vera Berdich in memory of Harold Joachim, 1984.674. Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, New York.

A few years later, around 1956, she began transferring photo images onto canvases, whereby the collage element was transferred, rather than the original paper pasted, onto the support medium. Then, using oil and brush, she distorted or added to the printed imagery. For two decades, she created over a dozen of these collage-paintings on an enormous scale, perhaps attempting to rival the huge size of abstract expressionist canvases. Critics such as Harry Bouras compared her transfer process to Robert Rauschenberg’s, and claimed that her technique preceded his.3 Berdich’s themes were as complicated and mysterious as her processes. She explored the crevices of the mind, encouraged first by symbolism and then by surrealism, the latter an aesthetic she was introduced to in the early 1940s by fellow teachers Kathleen Blackshear and Whitney Halstead. Even though local Chicago artists did not exhibit surrealist themes and motifs until the late 1930s, and collectors did not amass holdings until the 1950s, fantasy and visionary art had a long history in this city. References to music, literature, the Bible, and myths appear throughout Berdich’s oeuvre; her titles alone indicate sources in Lewis Carroll novels, Richard Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman, and Eurydice from the classical myth modernized by Jean Cocteau in his 1950 film Orphée. Time and memory became her overriding themes. Several works refer to metamorphosis and mutations, while others allude to death. In some ways, Berdich’s prints suggest palimpsests of bygone times—especially those in which classical pillars and renaissance architectural details are shrouded in varying colored drapes, murky shadows, or clouds. By the 1960s, the ghostly aspect of so many of Berdich’s prints became metaphors for the era, as her imagery and mood are sometimes expressions of pessimism and angst. She VERA BERDICH

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figure 164 Vera Berdich, Brain Box, 1973. Oil with collage transfer on canvas, 48 × 54 in. Private collection. Photo courtesy of Mongerson Gallery, Chicago.

created monsters analogous to the ones that the European surrealists fabricated during the 1930s and 1940s to convey their reactions to the uncertainty and destruction caused by political clashes and war. Beginning in the 1960s, she transformed her love of nature, seen in her early bucolic landscapes, into harrowing, grotesque animal and plant creatures, perhaps conveying her own anxiety about American military actions in Korea and Vietnam. Suggesting the mood of post–World War II existentialism, Berdich sometimes sourced metaphysics for answers. Titles refer to talismans, exorcism, mesmerism, divination, telepathy, psychic phenomena, dreams, and apparitions. These esoteric concepts, as well as her frequent incorporation of body parts, especially the skull and spinal column, were favorite surrealist devices. Her constant inclusion of eyes in portraits, floating alone and within other objects, underscores her multifold exploration of the concepts of perception, decep364

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figure 165 Vera Berdich, Caucus Race, from Alice in Wonderland series, 1962. Color etching on Japanese paper, image/print 9 ⁷/₈ × 15 ⁷/₈ in. The Art Institute of Chicago. Gift of Vera Berdich in memory of Harold Joachim, 198.675. Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, New York.

tion, and self. She seems to question the belief in the popular all-seeing-eye motif, suggesting that an inward glance might be more effective for understanding; at times she literally delves into the mind through its physical manifestation, the brain, as dissected by modern medicine. Berdich founded the Printmaking Department at SAIC, specializing in intaglio. As with her own oeuvre, she encouraged pupils to experiment beyond the limits of traditional practices. Well suited for teaching, she discussed her unusual creative processes and themes, detailing them in her gallery talks, lectures, and catalogues. Despite her quirky personality, the department grew considerably during her thirty-three-year career at SAIC, as she was a much-sought-after mentor. Those admirers included Leon Golub, Robert Indiana, Ellen Lanyon, and Suellen Rocca, but most of all the Chicago imagists. NOTES 1.  Harold Joachim, “Preface,” Vera Berdich, typed ms (Libertyville, IL: David Adler Cultural Center, 1982), n.p. 2.  Vera Berdich, “Background and Early Artistic Development,” typed ms, no date [1977 or later], p. 3, in Berdich Pamphlet, Ryerson Library, Art Institute of Chicago. 3.  For example, Harry Bouras, “Review of Berdich’s 1983 exhibition Vision and Observations,” WFMT/ FM Chicago, 1983; transcript, p. 6 (courtesy of Bob Hiebert, Printworks, Ltd., Chicago).

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FOR FURTHER READING Silverman, Lanny, and Franz Schultze. The Unquiet Eye: Vera Berdich, A Retrospective. Chicago: Chicago Cultural Center, 1995. Vera Berdich papers. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Vera Berdich papers. Ryerson Library, Archives, Art Institute of Chicago.

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ROBERT COZ ZOLINO

GEORGE MORRISON Grand Portage Anishinaabe b. 1919, Chippewa City, Minnesota d. 2000, Grand Marais, Minnesota

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by George Morrison was 2015. It was the day before my interview at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and I had never set foot in the museum, so I went to explore. I walked up the grand stairway that leads into the museum’s original building, designed by McKim, Mead, and White, passed friendly greeters, turned right, and wandered down a long hall before turning to enter a gallery. It was the first of a suite of spaces devoted to Native American art and I chose it at random. What I encountered in the space would shift my consciousness. It resulted in new friendships, expanded networks, and meaningful connections. It deepened my curatorial practice. What set this transformation in motion was a large wood piece, Collage IX: Landscape (1974) by George Morrison. It took up the entire east wall of the gallery, where it quietly commanded attention. While massive, it is not ostentatious. Though it is colorful, the eye needs time to adjust to its rhythm and nuances before a full appreciation of its chromatic range develops. Titled with a reference to nature, that connection is revealed slowly and then thrills with its organic rhyme. Morrison clearly assembled its parts in a specific order, but the materials seemed simply presented, selected because of their individual character. Where did he HE FIRST TIME I SAW AN ARTWORK

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figure 166 George Morrison, Collage IX: Landscape, 1974. Wood, 60 ¹/₈ × 168 ½ × 3 in. Minneapolis Institute of Arts. The Francis E. Andrews Fund, 75.24. © Estate of George Morrison/Briand Morrison (in copyright).

intervene with his hand? It was not possible to see. The scale and its unity, the confidence and ambition—everything combined to make me say out loud, “Who did this? What is this?” I felt a delight in being surprised, being re-enchanted with creativity, and amazed by something extraordinary that had been brought forth, had not existed before Morrison made it. I was surprised to find that Morrison was born in 1919, making him part of a generation I have spent a lot of time with as friend and art historian. As I learned more about Morrison’s career, his work, his friendships, and his deeper connections in the world, I kept muttering, “How did I not know about him? Why did I not know about him?”1 It turns out I had heard a little about him, since he appears briefly in Ann Gibson’s Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (1999). But what I experienced in the gallery erased the modest reproductions in that book from my mind and refocused me on truly seeing Morrison. It also shifted me immediately into asking, “Who else do I not know about? Who are the other Indigenous modernists? How did Morrison and his contemporaries think of identity in relation to art? Did they fight against it, embrace it, or was it complicated?” Of course it’s complicated, because human beings are complicated. Morrison often said he was an artist who happened to be Indian, not an Indian artist. At the time of a huge exhibition of historical Native American art in Minneapolis, Morrison told the Minneapolis Tribune, “I have never tried to prove that I was an Indian through my art. . . . Yet, there may remain deeply hidden some remote suggestion of the rock whence I was hewn, the preoccupation of the textural surface, the mystery of the structural and organic element, the enigma of the horizon, or the color of the wind.”2 What Morrison conveyed was a sense that place matters. Where you come from physically, historically, and where you are spiritually. It is in you and you are part of it. This was a rare reflection on that relationship for Morrison. It came in the wake of the 1968 founding of the American Indian Movement (AIM) in Minneapolis and his own 1970 return to the Twin Cities after many decades on the East Coast. Born in Chippewa City in northern Minnesota, this return to the region would inspire his last three decades of work. Morrison 368

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had earlier considered himself an artist—in response, perhaps, to being considered “not Indian enough” to be included in exhibitions organized by Native arts organizations or defined first by his heritage in an art world prone to boxes, bins, and labels. By 1972, in the wake of multiple parallel civil rights efforts that included AIM, Morrison may have started to understand how embracing that part of who he was did not mean reducing himself to a label, but rather could be an expansion of his own understanding of the ways he navigated existence. Later in life, after many health challenges, Morrison accepted two names, offered through a healing ceremony given to him by a cousin, Walter Caribou. These Ojibwe names were Wah-wah-ta-ga-nah-gah-boo (Standing in the Northern Lights) and Gwe-ki-ge-nah-gah-boo (Turning the Feather Around). Having these names presented to him in ceremony by an elder meant a lot to Morrison. In their evocation of landscape and sky, they underscored the continual source of his vision—the north shore of what the Ojibwe call gichi-gami or Great Sea (Lake Superior)—and the underlying image in Collage IX: Landscape. The great lake is the fundamental reference point for Morrison in so much of his work. It grounds him in life and in his relationship to the cosmos and to creativity. Its horizon line, often in the top third of a drawing, painting, or wood piece, is the charged place where everything touches. It appears in unlikely places, as in meticulously crafted ink drawings where lines dazzlingly proliferate in a manner of weaving, but allow for that calm edge to run across as a horizon, as when waves crash and reveal it in the distance. Standing on the shore of Lake Superior, it is easy to feel as though you are at the edge of a sea. It is massive, formidable, ever-changing, gorgeously terrifying, mysterious and glorious. It is the largest freshwater lake in the world by area and third by volume. Its deepest recesses go below thirteen hundred feet. Storms can swell its waves up to thirty feet high, and some intrepid Minnesotans surf these waves. In winter. The rocks on its northern shore are endlessly fascinating, compulsively collectable, and they date back billions of years, to the earth’s early prehistory. Morrison’s ancestors were the first human inhabitants of the area. No wonder this natural wonder is central to his work. But it isn’t just this vast sea, it’s the entire environment around, affected by and affecting the water. And no matter what colors or textures erupted in the environment—and despite the distinctive character of the seasons—the horizon was a meaningful place to focus his gaze: Every moment, the horizon is present. The horizon has been an obsession with me for most of my life. It makes an indelible image that, for me, stems from being born and growing up near the edge of the lake. Later, spending many summers on the Atlantic shores reinforced it. I think of the horizon line as the edge of the world, the dividing line between water and sky, color and texture. It brings up the literal idea of space in a painting. From the horizon, you go beyond the edge of the world to the sky and, beyond that, to the unknown. I always imagine, in a certain surrealist way, that I am there. I like to imagine it is real.3

Morrison started these “wood paintings” in 1965, while in Provincetown, Massachusetts. He was thrilled that the driftwood that washed up on the Atlantic shore came from “the GEORGE MORRISON

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figure 167 George Morrison, Untitled, 1960. Oil and acrylic on linen, 31 ½ × 76 ½ in. Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. John Weber, 75.75. © Estate of George Morrison/Briand Morrison (in copyright).

South Seas, the Caribbean, the North Atlantic. It all washed up on this tip of Cape Cod. Some had bits of paint, half worn off. Some had rust stains or colors soaked in. Industrial boards were washed nice and gray. Nail holes added texture and color where rusted nails had oxidized the wood. There was an interesting history in those pieces—who had touched them, where they had come from.”4 Morrison and his children and friends’ children began collecting it. People who saw his first attempts began collecting and sending him pieces. Collage IX: Landscape represents connections in the world, relationships between shores, nature and the artist, chance and deliberation, things that escaped their borders and traveled on the waves to him. Pieces of former trees that friends saw and thought to pick up and send to him. He devised them from scratch, out of his head—an automatic, improvisatory process comfortable to him. In his earlier paintings made with no aim of recognizable imagery, Morrison took care to assemble the necessary components (or had a vague starting point in his mind) and then worked spontaneously over many hours in a single night, exploring the possibilities of paint to suggest images rather than depict tangible things. “I was trying to capture an inner thing,” he recalled of paintings like Untitled (1960), “where you began with the act of painting itself, then images began to emerge. Almost like subconscious painting.”5 For the “wood paintings,” he allowed a deliberate reference to landscape and a horizon line, but carefully considered the information each piece brought to the whole. “The driftwood itself gives a sense of history—wood that has had a connection to the earth yet has come from the water. I realize now that in making these, I may have been inspired subconsciously by the rock formations of the North Shore.”6 This reference to stones is evident to anyone who has visited Lake Superior’s north shore. Morrison’s varied sizes of wood often look like mineral deposits, pebbles embedded in boulders, the crevices that hold them shaped and revealed by millions of wave crashes on their surfaces. Seeing Morrison’s work and learning who he was became a way in to a new place for me. He provided an opening, a revelation, and a path to new narratives and ties in what became 370

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figure 168 George Morrison, Untitled, 1973. Ink on paper, 23 × 23 in. Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Purchased with matching grant from the Museum Purchase Plan and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1973. © Estate of George Morrison/Briand Morrison (in copyright).

my community. Following that invitation to know Morrison has expanded my practice, my humanity, my connections where I am. I have devoted myself to learning the history and the cultures that come together in Minneapolis, the deep histories and those that are raw, just under the surface. That is what Morrison has brought to me. Where he has led me. The new relationships I have with makers here, Indigenous and not, is a means to respect where I am, to learn from it and to be an advocate for what is good in it. The opportunity to be present here has reinforced my conviction that the narratives I always bristled against were fundamentally untrue, were hiding things. There are perpetually more reasons to poke and prod and dig. Those invitations come to me, as clear as spoken words, from artwork itself. GEORGE MORRISON

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Place has been a fundamental teacher for me in each of the places where I have lived and made deep connections: Chicago, Madison, Philadelphia, Minneapolis. I have valued these lessons and those who have been the agents of new knowledge, new perspectives, living and in spirit. It’s up to me to put that into practice, to have faith in what has been revealed and to be the agent of change with and for others. It is a partnership across time, across differences, a recognition that we need to collaborate fully, to speak without fear in support of new narratives. This is fundamental to art history and to being a curator. NOTES 1.  For more on why such questions continue to arise, see Robert Cozzolino, “Claiming the Unknown, the Forgotten, the Fallen, the Lost, and the Dispossessed,” Panorama 2 (Fall 2016), https://editions.lib.umn.edu/ panorama/article/robert-cozzolino-patrick-and-aimee-butler-curator-of-paintings-minneapolis-institute-ofart. 2.  The exhibition was American Indian Art: Form and Tradition, jointly presented by the Walker Art Center and Minneapolis Institute of Art in 1972. Morrison quoted in the Minneapolis Tribune, October 22, 1972. 3.  George Morrison and Margot Fortunato Galt, Turning the Feather Around (Saint Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1998), 192. 4.  Ibid., 125. 5.  Ibid., 111–112. 6.  Ibid., 128.

FOR FURTHER READING Morrison, George, and Margot Fortunato Galt. Turning the Feather Around. Saint Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1998.

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SOME ARTISTS DEVELOP A FACILITY ,

and a reputation, in a particular medium, then devote years and careers to it—for example, a southwestern bultero (carver of wooden religious figures) or a printmaker known for a specialty in etching or lithography or another graphic medium. Other creators explore a variety of techniques and materials in their work: painters who make prints, sculptors who design furniture, potters who also paint. Given their versality, the images they create and the objects they craft may be quite adventuresome and challenge easy classification. Traditionally, all artists have been concerned on some level with design, or should have been. For the varied artists gathered in this chapter, formal clarity and compositional design are often paramount concerns in the creation of new work. Some of the unique items included here— maps and book covers, locomotives and woven bags, shop facades and altarpieces—are utilitarian, an intended role that literally and figuratively shapes their creation. Others, such as miniature movie houses and mechanical dragonflies, or fragile cut papers with incredibly delicate script, are more fanciful and decidedly less useful, but for the delight they brought to their makers and now bring to the viewer.

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JOSEF DIAZ

DON BERNARDO MIERA Y PACHECO b. 1713, Valle de Carriedo, Spain d. 1785, Santa Fe, New Mexico

Miera y Pacheco: A Renaissance Man in EighteenthCentury New Mexico

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HOUGH SMALL IN PHYSICAL STATURE —just

five feet tall— Spanish-born Don Bernardo Miera y Pacheco cast a considerable shadow across the eighteenth-century frontier of the Spanish Empire, now the American Southwest. The range of his accomplishments as an artist, cartographer, engineer, explorer, and military captain invites comparisons to the Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci. Miera y Pacheco’s exquisite paintings and religious carvings alone would have earned him a place in history. He was also one of the foremost early cartographers of the vast uncharted lands of Spain’s new colonies, producing maps famous for accuracy and artistry. He applied his artistic talents to the sacred as well as the secular, in the process helping create a new style of painting for the New World. Take a look at the first stirrings of what we now identify as the santero tradition of New Mexico, and you’ll find Miera y Pacheco’s hand. Employing European styles and paints to create religious art, Miera y Pacheco stimulated a group of artists who embraced local materials—ponderosa pine, cottonwood, and pigments borrowed from Native Americans. Together, these artists forged a style that was grounded in tradition but distinct to New Mexico. From this creative

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figure 169 Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, Mapa de la parte interna de la Nuevo México, ca. 1758. Oil on canvas, 42 ½ × 39 in. New Mexico History Museum, Santa Fe, NMHM/DCA 09599.45.

stew came retablos (images of saints painted on wooden panels) and bultos (sacred figures carved in the round). A man for all seasons, born in the northern Basque province of Santander, Miera y Pacheco was educated as a military engineer, a profession that included cartography and field astronomy. Like many of his peers, he ventured to Spanish America, where he traveled to Chihuahua, moving with his family in 1743 to the Villa de Guadalupe del Paso (now the El Paso/Juárez region). In early 1756, New Mexico governor Marín del Valle enticed him to move to Santa Fe by offering him the position of alcalde mayor (chief judge and administrator) of 376

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the Pecos and Galisteo pueblos. The viceroy in Mexico City, frustrated by his lack of geographic knowledge of the northern frontier, had ordered governors of the northern provinces to produce detailed maps, and Governor Marín commissioned Miera y Pacheco. The two surveyed lands throughout the domain of modern-day New Mexico in the second half of 1757. The next spring, Miera y Pacheco drew an elaborate, richly decorated map of the entire “kingdom.” Over the next quarter century, many more would follow. That first map provided unusual detail for the era’s cartography, using several legends to describe the province and its twenty-two pueblos. It gave population statistics, livestock numbers, and strategic locations for defense, as well as possible battlegrounds. In April 1758, Marín submitted Miera y Pacheco’s product, a colorful map painted on cotton cloth, to Viceroy Agustín de Ahumada in Mexico City. Thereafter, Miera y Pacheco enlisted as a mapmaker in the Domínguez-Escalante expedition, one of the most important European explorations of the American West. Fray Francisco Atanasio Domínguez had come to New Mexico on an inspection trip of the Franciscan missions. In April 1776, while in Santa Fe, he learned of a project by another Franciscan, Father Vélez de Escalante, to forge a northern route to the port of Monterey. Rather than compete, the two friars decided to journey together. Escalante (who, like Miera y Pacheco, came from Spain’s Santander province) engaged the cartographer to command the accompanying soldiers and map the route. Ultimately, the participants considered the journey a failure. Historians, however, recognized the courage of the explorers, and Miera y Pacheco’s maps continued to be used by pioneers well into the nineteenth century. The artist applied his talents to the sacred as well as the secular. Many art historians consider Miera y Pacheco one of the founders of the New Mexico santero tradition, specifically alluding to his prototype development of retablos and bultos. His diverse artistic talents, skill in making sacred images, and understanding of religious iconography made him a wellknown and sought-after source of religious images. Friars at Pueblo missions and Spanish colonists commissioned him to create images for their churches. At Nambe Pueblo, he was commissioned to paint a panel of the Immaculate Conception for a mission built around 1725 under orders by Governor Juan Domingo Bustamante. Another piece, San Raphael Archangel, was commissioned by Doña Apolonia de Sandoval and dated 1780; it now resides in the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in Santa Fe. Miera y Pacheco received commissions to create altarpieces, such as the one from Don Francisco Antonio Marín del Valle, governor and captain-general of the province, and his wife, Doña María Ignacia Martínez de Ugarte. They commissioned the stone altarpiece of La Castrense that now adorns Cristo Rey Church on Canyon Road in Santa Fe. His art sparked a fusion of aesthetics, materials, and styles that helped create the culturally unique santero tradition that began in the late eighteenth century, flowered into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues to thrive today in New Mexico. Bernardo Miera y Pacheco was a complex individual, a talented polymath who lived in a remote place that invited him to innovate and diversify his interests. He lived between two worlds, as a Spanish colonist in a place of indigenous peoples. He saw what many others of his time did not: a DON BERNARDO MIERA Y PACHECO

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figure 170 Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, San Raphael Archangel, 1780. Pine, gesso, oil paint, 49 ¼ × 24 in. Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, Spanish Colonial Arts Society, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Gift of Dr. Frank E. Mera, 1954.077.

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figure 171 Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, La Castrense (Altar screen dedicated to Our Lady of Light), 1761. Volcanic stone, paint. Cristo Rey Church, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Photo courtesy of Father Timothy Martinez, Pastor.

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crossroads blending and creating a new culture we now know as New Mexican. Sadly, only a few of his works are known to have survived. FOR FURTHER READING Diaz, Josef, ed. The Art & Legacy of Bernardo Miera y Pacheco: New Spain’s Explorer, Cartographer, and Artist. Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 2013. Kessell, John L. Miera y Pacheco: A Renaissance Spaniard in Eighteenth-Century New Mexico. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013. Wroth, William. Christian Images in Hispanic New Mexico. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1982.

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WENDY BELLION

JOHN JOSEPH HOLLAND b. 1776, London, England; to United States, 1796 d. 1820, New York, New York

Behind the Scenes: John Joseph Holland

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billing in art history. By design, their work was intended to serve as a backdrop to theatrical action. Originality was less important than the fabrication of “stock pieces” that could be reused for many productions. Seldom was such work signed; seldom has it survived. Consequently, even the most talented scene painters have fallen into obscurity. All of this was true of John Joseph Holland, a British scene painter who immigrated to the United States in 1796. Yet Holland was, in his day, an art star of the playhouse. He fashioned illusionistic imagery and spectacles that often upstaged the actors. He draped prosceniums with enormous landscapes and devised panoramas of American cities. He packed houses with admiring critics and paying publics. In so doing, he made the theater into one of the most vibrant spaces of artistic innovation in the early United States. Ironically, for an Englishman born in 1776, the year that Britain’s North American colonies declared independence, Holland’s success in the United States depended on his experiences in the imperial metropole. As a boy, he apprenticed to scene painters at London’s Haymarket and Covent Garden theaters, where his training coincided with a surging taste for spectacular visual effects. New theatrical CENE PAINTERS RARELY GET TOP

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genres—including Gothic dramas and pantomimes—demanded new media technologies, and so Holland learned to paint transparencies, thinly painted canvases that enabled illusionistic transformations of lighting and form, and to build the trick machinery that produced thunder, explosions, and ghosts. When Holland was recruited to join Philadelphia’s new Chestnut Street Theatre in 1796, he was not only prepared to reproduce this dynamic artistry for the American stage. He knew that the art itself would lure audiences. Pictorial drama thus became integral to the Chestnut’s productions in its earliest years. The theater routinely advertised the scenic and technological novelty of its plays. It prominently named Holland and other scene painters alongside the actors who composed the cast lists. Often it described the scenery in greater detail than the plots. When the Chestnut took Columbus: Or, a World Discovered on the road to New York (one of the stops in a touring circuit that extended south to Maryland and Virginia), it stoked the intrigue of potential playgoers with promises of a storm and an earthquake, a volcanic eruption, and “a view of the Temple of the Sun, designed and executed by Mr. Holland.”1 In Philadelphia, a staging of Pizarro in 1800 boasted views of encampments, a cavern and dungeon, and a “background wild and rocky, with a torrent falling down the precipice, over which a bridge is formed by a felled tree.”2 At a time when public venues for art were few and far between, as many as two thousand spectators crammed the Chestnut nightly to see the scene painters’ work. The theater’s promotional strategies quite literally paid off. The Chestnut profited on nights that featured productions rich in visual spectacle. It even extended to its scene painters the familiar practice of “benefit nights,” in which a single actor organized the evening’s production and took a large share of the house. The benefit nights for Holland and his assistants usually generated the theater’s best income of the week and generous paychecks for the artists.3 They also index the high regard that some scene painters commanded. During one benefit, a poet sang Holland’s praises while audiences gazed at his panorama painting of a military siege: “Lov’d be the substance, lov’d the picture too!”4 Decades later, William Dunlap chronicled Holland’s achievements, writing that “streets, chambers, temples or forests, grew under his hand as by magic.”5 How did Holland achieve this success? Skill certainly had something to do with it: a design of a Gothic hall and a streetscape of lower Manhattan, presumed to be sketches for sets, demonstrate his facility with perspective, color, and chiaroscuro. His inventiveness was also an asset. In 1805, Holland realized one of the theater’s most unusual and popular productions: a “display of scenery” that translated five urban and rural views by William Birch and other printmakers into huge “drops” that scrolled down before the viewers’ eyes, transporting them from Philadelphia’s fabled Treaty Elm to the geological marvel of Virginia’s Natural Bridge. Holland matched his creativity with large-scale ambition: he seized on national events to devise patriotic panoramas, decorated banquet rooms with transparencies rich in political symbolism, and covered the theater’s facade with paintings celebrating the Fourth of July.6 The only known image of Holland, painted by John Evers shortly before Holland’s premature death in 1820, ably summons the artist’s adventurousness. The distant gaze, the playful 382

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figure 172 John Joseph Holland, “Design for a Side Chapel in the Gothic Style,” for Adelmorn the Outlaw, 1802. Graphite on paper, 12 ¼ × 16 ¾ in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Harry Shaw Newman, 1946, 46.100.25. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image source: Art Resource, New York.

curls, the loosened collar: for Holland’s contemporaries, such attributes conveyed an artist possessed of Romantic ingenuity. For those schooled in physiognomic theories, Holland’s pronounced forehead would have signaled intellectual powers, too. Like many theater people, Holland wore several hats, occasionally filling in as an actor and scouting potential performance venues. He had the business acumen to claim the painted sets as his own property, selling them to the Chestnut in 1807 when he left Philadelphia to join the Park Theatre in New York. Over the following decade, he redesigned auditoriums, organized a new theater company, and mounted two successful circular panoramas: one representing Manhattan and the other Boston.7 At the same time, he dipped his toe into the emerging sphere of academic exhibitions. Holland contributed landscapes to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) in 1811 and 1812, and he was a founder of Philadelphia’s Columbian Society of Artists, which sought to promote the careers of living artists. Fourteen topographical views of New York, produced during the War of 1812 when Holland served with the U.S. Army, help to demonstrate his talents.8 At the center of all this activity, though, is a lacuna: little of Holland’s art for the theater is extant. To be sure, it was never intended to be permanent, and much of it may have been JOHN JOSEPH HOLLAND

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figure 173 John Evers, John Joseph Holland, 1819. Watercolor on ivory, 1 ¾ × 1 ³/₈ in. New-York Historical Society. Purchase, The Louis Durr Fund, 1925.93. © New-York Historical Society.

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destroyed in a fire that brought down the Chestnut in 1820. Yet this absence also raises questions about the kind of art that historically has been deemed worthy of preservation. Despite the critical and public attention Holland garnered, was his work inherently devalued by its association with popular entertainment? Whatever its aesthetic merits, was it beyond the pale of “art” for a culture that was keen to encourage fine arts academies? Despite the loss of his own work, Holland illuminates art worlds that merit greater study. While his abilities won applause that few other scene painters garnered, Holland was only one of numerous artists who routinely moved in and out of theaters during their careers. His expanded network included a who’s who of early nineteenth-century artists and architects, namely Charles Willson Peale, Thomas Sully, Benjamin Latrobe, William Strickland, William Rush, David Edwin, and Charles Robert Leslie. Moreover, the theater audiences who cheered his designs were not only exponentially more numerous than the crowds that attended PAFA exhibitions; they were also more diverse socially and racially, for people of all classes, free and enslaved, visited the playhouse. “All the canvass [sic] breathes,” swooned one of Holland’s poetic fans in 1806.9 Even today, Holland invites us to expand our understanding of art to include the early nineteenth-century theater. NOTES 1.  “New Theatre, Greenwich Street,” The Diary or Loudon’s Register (New York), September 16, 1797. 2.  “New Theatre, The Last Night but One,” Gazette of the United States (Philadelphia), May 16, 1800. 3.  One of the Chestnut’s managers meticulously documented the income of all productions over decades; see the journal of William Warren, 3 vols. (1796–1827) (microfilm edition of unpublished journal). 4.  “Benefits,” The Theatrical Censor 15 (January 10, 1806): 134. 5.  William Dunlap, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States (originally published 1834; reprint, Boston, 1918), 198. 6.  Wendy Bellion, “City as Spectacle: William Birch and the Chestnut Street Theatre,” Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes 32, no. 1 (2012): 15–34; Wendy Bellion, “ ‘Here Trust Your Eyes’: Vision, Illusion, and the Chestnut Street Theatre,” Early American Literature 51, no. 2 (2016): 333–365. 7.  Nalleli Guillen, “ ‘The Humble, Though More Profitable Art’: Panoramic Spectacles in the American Entertainment World, 1794–1850,” PhD diss., University of Delaware, 2018. 8.  Dunlap, History, 198. 9.  “Benefits,” 134.

FOR FURTHER READING Stoddard, Richard. “Notes on John Joseph Holland, with a Design for the Baltimore Theatre, 1802.” Theatre Survey 12, no. 1 (1971): 58–66. Wolcott, John R. “Apprentices in the Scenic Room: Toward an American Tradition in Scenic Painting.” Nineteenth Century Theatre Research 4, no. 1 (1976): 24–39.

JOHN JOSEPH HOLLAND

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ALEXANDER NEMEROV

MARTHA ANN HONEYWELL b. 1786, Westchester County, New York d. 1856, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Without a Trace: The Art and Life of Martha Ann Honeywell

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is a small cut-paper design that resembles a star and a leaf. With flattened patterns laid down in levels, the design bursts outward in four large lobes pointing in the cardinal directions. Four additional green shapes like pine pods spread at the corners, a type of symmetrical exuberance laid down beneath the lighter-colored paper from which a serrated pattern skittering on the edges creates its own outward energy. All the time, however, the burst draws us inward. Made of scissorcut tendrils, the intricacies of the cut-paper interior—flowers, leaves, and stalks—lead to inner spirals of green and light green, a sacred circle belted by a thistle rotary and, further inward, a garland of delicate vines. Still smaller, edged in yet more leaves (these of a metallic luster), is an inner circle, smaller than the size of a modern penny, on which the Lord’s Prayer is minutely written. The writing, too small to be read with a magnifying glass, requires a loupe to be seen more clearly. Only about a third of an inch separates the first two lines, “Our Father who art in heaven,” from the last, “Written without hands by M. A . Honeywell.” “Written without hands”—the line gives pause. Martha Ann Honeywell, who made the piece, was born in 1786 in Westchester County, New York, without hands and with only three toes on one foot. One of five T THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART

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figure 174 Martha Ann Honeywell, Cut-paper Card with The Lord’s Prayer, ca. 1830. Cut-paper and pen, framed 8 ¼ × 7 ⁵/₈ in. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Mrs. Richard Riddell, 1984, 1984.1164.21. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

children, she went with her parents to lower Manhattan in the late eighteenth century, when she started her public artistic career at the age of twelve, performing embroidery and making silhouettes for a fee at one of the city’s public entertainments. Accompanied by her mother at first, Honeywell eventually worked and traveled alone, going to Europe for more than a decade as a young woman and returning to America to tour in the late 1820s. Soon afterward, she likely made the piece at the Metropolitan, one of many Lord’s Prayer cutouts she probably created on her artistic travels (many of them now lost). MARTHA ANN HONEYWELL

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figure 175 Martha Ann Honeywell, Cut-paper Card with The Lord’s Prayer, ca. 1830 (center detail). Cut-paper and pen. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Mrs. Richard Riddell, 1984, 1984.1164.21.

How did Honeywell make them? Ensconced as a feature attraction at the Peale Museum in Baltimore in 1828–29, she would sit like a Turkish sultan, her legs folded up beneath her, as she demonstrated the dexterity that had to be seen to be believed. Thanks to the research of Laurel Daen, the foremost authority on the artist’s life and work, we know that Honeywell wrote with her toes and that she cut paper and embroidered using a combination of her mouth, toes, and one of her stump arms. Daen cites the diary of William Bentley, a minister from Salem, Massachusetts, who saw Honeywell’s show in 1809: “She has only the first joints of both arms & one foot with three toes & in my presence wrought at embroidery, entering the needle with her toes & receiving it by the mouth, & putting the thread into her needle by 388

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her mouth & toes.” Bentley also describes how Honeywell made her cut patterns: “She cut papers in various fancy forms, using her scissors with her mouth & the short stump of her arm & she wrote a good letter with her toes.” Daen quotes also a more precise description of Honeywell’s paper cutting, this one from the artist’s tenure at the Peale Museum: “In paper cutting she holds the paper with her toes, and one handle of the scissors in her mouth, [which] she operates by moving the other handle with the short stump of her left arm.”1 Was Honeywell more than a traveling spectacle, a freak-show attraction of the kind then popular? Daen attends closely to the politics of Honeywell’s art and self-presentation, noting that in the early nineteenth century she was one of “dozens of atypically figured visual artists and performers, both women and men, [who] traversed the ever-expanding networks of road, boat, ship, and rail to exhibit their unusual physiques and sell their artwork to patrons.”2 Before P. T. Barnum and other entrepreneurs consolidated the display of so-called freaks, profiting from their display and performance, figures such as Honeywell were artisans of their own fate, crafting their self-presentation and making representations of curious onlookers, all for a price that allowed them to make their way in the world.3 But is that all? The paper cutout at the Metropolitan abounds in natural forms. Not representing an identifiable object found in nature (no leaf looks like it), the cutout nonetheless is like a type of all nature. If one were to press into the whirrings and secret heart of a pine cone, or a piece of bark, or a blade of grass, one would find—pattern upon pattern—a similar intricacy. Honeywell’s cutout implies a secret symmetry to the natural world, an infinite delicacy beyond what the eye can see. Although her hand makes it, the implication is that she has revealed—magically, without hands—the unity and diversity, the complex simplicity, that underwrites the world. That order, the cutout says, is divine. The Lord’s Prayer at the center, the pith and heart of the outward flow of forms, generates the gentle fur and serrated feathers of the star’s ruffled surface. As the smallest and most unbelievable thing in the cutout, the writing is the prayer at the center of all natural beauty, an umbilicus from which flow the capillaries and veins and arteries that see to the life of the whole. Although the spectacle of Honeywell sitting sultan-style might make her creations seem like only the flora of the bazaar and freak show, the theology of her craft is central. She made the little things fluent, bursting with their own eloquence. “The crowd,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of Americans in 1840, “seeks nothing in poetry but objects of vast dimensions.”4 But Honeywell spoke the oratory of tiny things. She drew the crowd in, whispering scripture they could hardly see. That must have made her a special kind of saint. She created her work astoundingly, in a feat of skill few could have guessed possible, but it was not the creation so much as the revelation of a natural order—an order otherwise imperceptible—that might most have inspired the awe of her beholders. She left it to people to believe, in other words, that only an afflicted person possessed the gift of miraculous representation. The natural world in its infinite beauty—a small slice of it sufficing as a sign of the cosmos—might not reveal itself to a different kind of soul. MARTHA ANN HONEYWELL

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Imagined this way, Honeywell’s birth defects were themselves a divine sign. They were not simply a heaven-ordained affliction she needed to overcome to show her dexterity and Christian good cheer. They were a blessing whereby the microscopic order of the world was revealed to her, and by her to the people who watched her work and who owned what she made. Honeywell died at age seventy in 1856, leaving virtually no trace except her art. Was it that she desired to vanish without record, or that she was fated to disappear for having revealed the intricate designs of the world? No matter, she had survived her own disaster, inflicted at birth—the splintering of her body in some preordained cosmic storm. By a distribution of maladies, her audiences might have found her missing hands mute, her mouth dexterous, or, by a similar transference, her mouth as mute as her hands—her speech being, in effect, limbless. But this mystical atmosphere of deprivation was the obscurity in which she saw her own finery of light. Her journey was straightforward. NOTES 1.  Baltimore Patriot, November 15, 1828. 2.  Laurel Daen, “Martha Ann Honeywell: Art, Performance, and Disability in the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 37 (Summer 2017). 3.  Ibid. Among other examples, Daen cites the recent scholarship of Susan Schweik, who has written on the “largely self-constructed career of a nineteenth-century disabled performer” in Schweik, “Marshall P. Wilder and Disability Performance History,” Disability Studies Quarterly 30, no. ¾ (2010), http://dsq-sds.org/ article/view/1271/1294. 4.  Alexis de Tocqueville, “Why American Writers and Speakers Are Often Bombastic,” in Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: Perennial Classics, 2000), 488.

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GAYLORD TORRENCE

A SKI BA KWA Meskwaki b. ca. 1846, probably Iowa or Kansas d. 1929, Meskwaki Settlement, Iowa

Remembered by Many Names

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ago in Art of the Great Lakes Indians, the modest catalogue for a pioneering 1973 exhibition organized by the Flint Institute of Arts. One small blackand-white illustration pictured a woven bag attributed to the maker Shkebaque. The name meant little to me, and it would be eleven years before I came across it again, recorded variously as A Ski Ba Qua, Skaba-quay, and Ash-Que-Pac-Qua; she was also cited as Mrs. Joe Tesson. In today’s written Meskwaki text, which is cursive, her name is spelled Askibaga, or A ski ba ga (with a half-space between each syllable), or, in English, A ski ba kwa. She lived during a time of enormous transition for the Meskwaki Nation. Without question, this woman was renowned in her community on the Meskwaki Settlement along the Iowa River near Tama, Iowa, during the last decades of her life, and her work likely was celebrated in culturally related Native communities in Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. She also became well known to the many museum field collectors who visited the settlement around the turn of the twentieth century seeking Meskwaki objects for their institutions. That her works were highly prized is evident from the number of A ski ba kwa bags found in the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution; the FIRST ENCOUNTERED HER NAME FORTY-SEVEN YEARS

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Field Museum, Chicago; the Museum of the American Indian/Heye Foundation, New York; the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin; and several others—essentially the great natural history museums and other Western world institutions that were building important collections of Native American art and material culture. The series of bags created by A ski ba kwa first became apparent to me in 1984 when mentor and colleague Robert Hobbs and I began work on an exhibition featuring two centuries of Meskwaki artistic expression. In North American and European collections, I encountered a number of remarkably beautiful, finely woven storage bags that were uniformly consistent in style (materials, technique, imagery, and color) and singular in appearance. They had to have been created by the same maker—an artist with a powerful and innovative vision. At least fourteen such bags are now known to exist in collections; others surely remain preserved within the Meskwaki community or in unknown locations. Most, if not all, were collected between 1895 and 1920. Although most examples were identified by tribe alone, as Mesquakie (the spelling at the time), Fox, or Sac and Fox, I finally encountered a bag documented as having been acquired directly from the maker, thus providing the key for identifying the entire series. This bag, now in the Detroit Institute of Arts (acc. no. 81.401), was purchased by famed collector Milford G. Chandler, a regular visitor to the settlement during the early twentieth century. A label accompanying the object states: “A 2877; Shkebaque, wife of Joe Tesson, Fox interp. bag, c. 1890.” A second bag, now in the National Museum of the American Indian, also attributed to her, is recorded as having been purchased by Chandler, and he is known to have collected a third, now in a private collection. Chandler was surely a frequent guest in the Tesson home. A ski ba kwa’s husband, Joseph Tesson Jr., was prominent in the Meskwaki community in his own right, a member of the tribal council and official interpreter. He was of Ioway/French heritage, had served in the Civil War and as a scout for the U.S. Cavalry against the Lakota, and was an interpreter at the Fort Laramie Treaty. He was known to be progressive and was recorded in 1914 as living in a frame house with a telephone and owning an automobile. He was also a member of the Native American Church, which had taken hold on the settlement. The same source noted that A ski ba kwa did not speak English and implied that she was a traditional woman. Joe Tesson must have been a resource for outsiders, able to translate and provide information as well as objects. A ski ba kwa may have served as a source regarding past traditions. A ski ba kwa’s twined bags are a variant of the flat, rectangular, finger-woven containers produced throughout the Eastern Woodlands, Great Lakes, and Prairie regions since before European encounter. Early twined bags were constructed of finely twisted pale tan nettle or apoclynum (basswood) fiber and dark, brownish-black buffalo hair, which usually formed the designs. Sometimes cotton or linen thread was substituted for the vegetal fiber. The bags were used for transport and storage of both secular goods and materials associated with sacred power, healing, and ritual. They feature both geometric and figurative imagery, and many depict spirit beings, or manitous, joined with abstract representations of supernatural power. The manitous, inhabitants of the Upper and Lower 392

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figure 176 Meskwaki artist, Bag, ca. 1850. Vegetal fiber, bison hair, commercial wool yarn, and native tanned leather, 7 × 10 ½ in. Detroit Institute of Arts. Founders Society Purchase, 81.390. Photo © Detroit Institute of Arts/Bridgeman Images.

Worlds, are represented as Thunderbirds, Underwater Panthers, turtles, deer, and humans. These powerful creatures were conceived in perpetual conflict—a metaphor for the universal struggles inherent in the natural world and the understanding that their interaction represents the essential balance of a cohesive universe. Thus, together, the images on the two sides of the bags form a cosmological diagram of a world alive with both visible and unseen forces. The most complex early containers are known as “panel bags” because of their compositional structure. Two narrow, vertical bands of geometric motifs frame a large central space, or panel, occupied by the primary image. Small outer spaces at the edges are either unadorned or filled with simple geometric patterns that continue to the reverse side, joining the opposing designs of the two panels physically and conceptually. The incorporation of European sheep’s wool in the eighteenth century—in the form of dyed yarn, trade cloth, and blankets that were unraveled and added into the vertical bands of the design—extended the range of color and texture. A SKI BA KWA

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figure 177 A ski ba kwa, Meskwaki, Bag, ca. 1890. Nettle fiber and commercial wool yarn, 10 ¾ × 14 ½ in. Jason and Annabelle Baldwin Collection.

A ski ba kwa created her exquisite works at a time when the production of twined bags was sharply declining or completely absent among the Meskwaki and all other tribes in the region. Moreover, she did not simply revive the older form; she expanded the tradition to encompass a new, singular interpretation of classic designs and composition. Using the archaic open-weft twining technique, she skillfully combined nettle fiber and commercial wool to maximize the visual effects of color and texture. She exploited the vivid yarns, sometimes establishing a solid-colored ground for the figures, but most often—and unprecedentedly—she would break the field into broad, horizontal bands of intense blue and red that cut across the images. This unique feature creates an illusion of transparency and activates the background in opposition to the vertical stacking of the figures. It is a signature hallmark of A ski ba kwa’s work. She adopted the traditional imagery of Underwater Panthers and Thunderbirds, but her vocabulary also included horses as a favored motif and humans, sometimes in groups. She also used an abstract diamond pattern with radiating lines called “spiderweb,” a design associated with spiritual engagement and enlightenment. Dark figures are placed against a pale ground, although some bags feature light figures against a darker field. 394

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figure 178 A ski ba kwa, Meskwaki, reverse of Bag, ca. 1890 (figure 177).

One bag includes both visualizations, with dark primary figures and light deer at the edges. On one side are six iconic Underwater Panthers, powerful mythic beings of the Lower World. The blocky, horned creatures face one another in pairs, with their long tails extending beneath them and over their backs, a classic configuration. The other side features six Thunderbirds floating within a central diamond, a variant of the spiderweb motif. They vary in size and shape, evoking the differing winged manitous of the Upper World. Wrapping around the sides are eight deer, one glancing back over its shoulder in a movement that visually animates the entire group. The vertical panels are filled with hourglass and barred motifs in a blaze of blue, purple, turquoise, yellow, and amber stacked within the broad bands. The bag makes visible a world filled with powerful spirits and charged with spiritual energy. That A ski ba kwa was almost never identified as the maker of these extraordinary works is part of a larger dynamic marking the collecting of historical Native American art. The bags were acquired not as works of art, but as ethnographic specimens representative of a cultural tradition. The concept of the individual, named artist, possessed with a personal vision, A SKI BA KWA

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was seldom considered even for objects recognized as superior in quality. Exceptions existed, but essentially A ski ba kwa’s works fell within the mix of other Native American items acquired as trade goods, mementos, war trophies, historical markers, scientific specimens, souvenirs, curiosities, gifts, and decorator items. Like many historical practitioners and Native American artists today, A ski ba kwa worked within the dynamic of her own time and cultural milieu, within the sphere of family, community, colonialism, and interaction with the outside world. And in negotiating this construct, she was a true visionary. FOR FURTHER READING Hodge, G. Stuart, et al. Art of the Great Lakes Indians. Flint, MI: Flint Institute of Arts, 1973. Penney, David W. Art of the American Indian Frontier: The Chandler-Pohrt Collection. Detroit, MI: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1994. Torrence, Gaylord, and Robert Hobbs. Art of the Red Earth People: The Mesquakie of Iowa. Iowa City: University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1989.

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ERICA HIRSHLER

SARAH WYMAN WHITMAN b. 1842, Lowell, Massachusetts d. 1904, Boston, Massachusetts

“

T

HE FUTURE WAS WITH HER ,” wrote lawyer and essayist John Jay

Chapman of his friend Sarah Wyman Whitman. He gave her an entire chapter in his book Memories and Milestones, along with William James and Charles Eliot Norton, among others. But Chapman was mistaken, for the future would turn away from Whitman. Today her multifaceted contributions to the arts remain underappreciated, like those of other women overshadowed by the men in their orbit and compromised by the vagaries of scholarship. She lingers in the shadows of William Morris Hunt and John La Farge, one of many talented women described as students or followers, rather than as innovators or leaders, set aside as a wealthy amateur or dabbler who tried her hand at too many things. Some say she was one of the inspirations for Esther in Henry Adams’s eponymous novel about a woman artist unable to become more than a “second rate amateur.” Historians of American stained glass or scholars of book cover designs often know her, but the full range of her accomplishments remains unseen. Whitman was an accomplished painter, stained glass artist, graphic designer, creator of decorative interiors, educator, philanthropist, organizer, woman of faith, suffragist, and intellectual saloniste. Surely she deserves our renewed attention for her expansive role as both artist and advocate.1 397

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Sarah de St. Prix Wyman was a daughter of New England, despite spending her early childhood in Baltimore, where her father had traveled to work in the family dry goods business. In 1853 the Wymans returned to Lowell, Massachusetts, and in 1866 Sarah married Henry Whitman, who became a prosperous wool merchant in Boston, an esteemed member of the business community and an avid clubman and sailor. Aside from their devoted involvement with Trinity Church, Henry Whitman seems to have shared few of his wife’s interests; he evidently tolerated her energy and creativity without participating in her activities—“they had their own exits and entrances, their own hours and their own friends,” as philosopher George Santayana put it.2 In 1868, Sarah Whitman began to study painting in the classes offered especially to women by William Morris Hunt, forming both an attachment to Hunt’s embrace of the French Barbizon School and also long-lasting friendships with her classmates, among them Helen Merriman, who arranged Whitman’s first ecclesiastical commission and later painted a penetrating portrait of her (in the Harvard University Portrait Collection). Likely following Hunt’s advice, Whitman traveled to France in 1877 and 1879, where she studied with Thomas Couture. Her Roses—Souvenir de Villier le bel, a memorial to the French artist, demonstrates her ability to manipulate paint, her lifelong devotion to color, and the spiritual underpinning of much of her work. For Whitman, the ingredients of beauty, art, nature, and faith were inseparable. Settled in a large house on a fine street on Boston’s Beacon Hill, Whitman held her first solo exhibition at Doll and Richards Gallery in 1882. The catalogue reveals a variety of patrons and a range of subjects—including tonal landscapes painted along Boston’s North Shore and in Newport, portraits, and floral compositions, among them loosely rendered rhododendrons splayed across panels and inscribed, in distinctive lettering, “les fleurs de mon amitiés,” a series clearly demonstrating Whitman’s burgeoning talent in decorative design. She continued to show her paintings, pastels, and watercolors into the 1890s, her palette lightening from the deep browns and yellows of her earliest work to an opalescent rainbow of hues, but she was never an impressionist, preferring instead to capture the atmosphere of place. “I take with me the munitions of war,” Whitman announced upon her departure to Bermuda in notes to her close friend Sarah Orne Jewett. “Oil paints, pastel, and even watercolours, for who shall say of what complexion the emotions of Bermuda might be. . . . It is a little world all by itself and such a world of colour.”3 Color played an important role in Whitman’s sustained engagement in another medium, stained glass. She evaded the fate of many women who worked in three dimensions, often seemingly confined to crafting small-scale works suitable for the home, although Whitman made those too—glass plaques, fire screens, and decorative panels for domestic interiors. But she also designed monumental windows for religious and educational institutions, among them Trinity Church and Harvard University. She opened the Lily Glass Works on Boylston Street, where she employed a foreman, cutters, and glaziers, advertising “windows made in stained and crystal glass, for use in churches or houses, from original designs,” and noting in particular that “all work—both in drawing and color—is done by the artist.” 398

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figure 179 Sarah Wyman Whitman, Roses—Souvenir de Villier le bel, 1879. Oil on panel, 18 × 8 ⁷/₈ in. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Bequest of the artist, 04.1719. Photo provided by Wikimedia Commons Creative Commons CC0 License.

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figure 180 Sarah Wyman Whitman, Peace and Honor, 1900. Leaded-glass window: pot-metal, opalescent, and uncolored glass, vitreous paint, 144 × 96 in. Dining hall windows, Memorial Hall, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photo by Ralph Lieberman, courtesy of Special Collections, Fine Arts Library, Harvard University.

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figure 181 Sarah Wyman Whitman, Cover Design for Charles Dudley Warner’s “Being a Boy,” 1897. Courtesy of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation, River Campus Libraries, University of Rochester.

Whitman’s stained glass has been studied and inventoried, from her first large-scale commission of 1884 at Central Congregational Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, to her final window for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis in 1904. Unlike the state of her friend John La Farge’s legacy, however, Whitman’s aesthetics in glass have yet to be integrated with her work in other media—or indeed with her activism. Her continuous quest for radiance and arrangement in all her endeavors seems headed toward a Gesamtkunstwerk both artistic and spiritual, an embodiment of the Arts and Crafts movement itself.4 It should not then come as a surprise that Whitman was a founder of Boston’s Society of Arts and Crafts in 1896, nor that she intended her work to reach the broadest possible audience. While her paintings, save when in exhibitions, were limited to the delectation of their owners and their friends, her glass could be seen by anyone entering the buildings. In book cover design, she could fulfill her own aspiration “to apply elements of design to these cheaply sold books; to put the touch of art on this thing that is going to be produced at a level price.” Produced in quantity by machine, bound in cloth rather than leather, mass-market books could still be a locus for art, Whitman said, a place for aesthetic decisions about color and design that could “charm” even those people who may have been unable to articulate the cause of their pleasure.5 She became one of publisher Houghton Mifflin’s most prolific and innovative designers, creating a signature lettering style and drawing from the contents of each book to craft individualized SARAH WYMAN WHITMAN

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decorations—a row of stylized poppies for Celia Thaxter’s An Island Garden, a single slender lotus stalk for Martin Brimmer’s Egypt, a rambling arabesque of leaves, twining over the spine and onto the back cover, for Charles Dudley Warner’s Being a Boy. Whitman went public in other ways as well, designing the carpet for Trinity Church, architectural ornaments for Isabella Stewart Gardner’s Fenway Court, as well as tombstones, memorials, and seals. Her democratic ideal of making art part of everyday life also manifested itself in her public service. In addition to her role at the Society of Arts and Crafts, Whitman lectured on design at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and served on its board of governors, the first woman to do so; she advocated for women’s education, involving herself deeply at Radcliffe College; and she was a significant donor to historically Black or proudly liberal colleges, particularly the Tuskegee Institute and Berea College. Whitman was a proselytizer on behalf of the uplifting power of art and its importance to all levels of society. “One finds everywhere in our country, to-day, manifested in various forms, a longing for the beautiful, a craving for that which is not bread, but which sooner or later is found to be essential to certain deep necessities of the human appetite,” Whitman wrote in 1897. She called for art to be integral to the American educational system, not simply through lessons but by building schools in which good design and examples of fine art were part of the learning environment. “We speak in the language of commerce, forgetting that art and love of art is not a commodity,” she said. Santayana credited her with devoting herself to “instilling the higher spirit of the art and crafts into the minds of working-girls.”6 Whitman may well have been Boston’s own William Morris, and she deserves recognition for her achievements. NOTES 1.  John Jay Chapman, Memories and Milestones (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1915), 103; Henry Adams, Esther (New York: Henry Holt, 1884), 49. 2.  Santayana referred to both Whitman and her contemporary, Isabella Stewart Gardner. George Santayana, The Middle Span (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1945), 123. 3.  Sarah Wyman Whitman to Sarah Orne Jewett, March 24 and April 12, 1892, in Letters of Sarah Wyman Whitman (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1907), 74–75. 4.  Handicraft 1, no. 1 (April 1902), v; see, for example, Virginia C. Raguin’s analysis and inventory of Whitman’s glass in Sarah Wyman Whitman, 1842–1904: The Cultural Climate in Boston (published by the author, 1993), and (among others) Molly Eckel, “ ‘A Touch of Art’: Sarah Wyman Whitman and the Art of the Book in Boston,” honors thesis, Wellesley College, 2012. 5.  Mrs. Henry Whitman, Notes of an Informal Talk on Book Illustration, Inside and Out, Given before the Boston Art Students’ Association, February 14, 1894 (Boston: Boston Art Students’ Association, 1894), 5, 6. 6.  Sarah W. Whitman, “Art in the Public Schools,” The Atlantic 79, no. 475 (May 1897): 617, 619; Santayana, Middle Span, 126.

FOR FURTHER READING Raguin, Virginia C. Sarah Wyman Whitman, 1842–1904: The Cultural Climate in Boston. Published by the author, 1993. Smith, Betty S. “Inside SPNEA: Sarah de St. Prix Wyman Whitman.” Old Time New England 77, no. 266 (1999): 47–64.

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HENRY ADAMS

RAYMOND LOEWY b. 1891, Paris, France; active in United States, 1919 onward d. 1985, Monte Carlo, Monaco

Raymond Loewy, Designer

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of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has received surprisingly little attention: the transformation in how nearly everything around us is designed and made. Chairs, desks, pens, cars, stoves, refrigerators, printing presses, lighting fixtures, and children’s toys all look very different than they did a century ago, and often are made through manufacturing processes and out of materials that did not exist then. If there was a key figure in this development, it was Raymond Loewy, who formulated design principles for the modern age. It’s ironic that he’s been largely passed over in surveys of American art. Few artists in human history have so radically reshaped the look of the world around us. Loewy was born in France and trained as an engineer. From childhood he was fascinated by modern fast-moving machines, such as cars and locomotives. Early on he developed a romantic idea of America, where the future was taking shape unencumbered by the past. As a young man he moved to New York, where he quickly became successful creating advertisements in a dramatic art deco style for department stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue. Producing advertisements, however, did not satisfy his ambition; with his background as an engineer, he NE OF THE MOST MOMENTOUS OCCURRENCES

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resolved to design not just advertisements, but the products themselves. While money was tight, and he lived in a tiny apartment, he purchased an expensive tuxedo and energetically attended parties where he handed out a card whose front read, “The better looking product will sell better.” It took several years before he connected with a client who was interested in working with him, Siegfried Gestetner, who ran a small company that made duplicating machines and wanted to upgrade his product. But there was a catch. Gestetner’s company was situated in London, and he had booked a return voyage to England in two weeks. They agreed that Loewy would attempt to come up with a new design in that time. He would be given a small sum with which to purchase materials and would collect his fee only if he came up with a successful product. Loewy then went out and purchased a large quantity of a type of oil-based clay known as “plastilene” and a plastic sheet. He placed one of Gestetner’s duplicators on the plastic sheet and within a few days had sculpted a new design. Essentially, he created a new envelope for the form and, in doing so, transformed the product in a variety of ways. The original duplicator was a machine with exposed mechanisms that looked like it belonged in a factory setting. Loewy transformed it into a handsome piece of furniture, suitable for an office or home. He also made the machine easier and safer to use. Since the machinery was now covered, it no longer spattered ink and there was no danger of catching hair or fingers in the moving parts. It was also easier to use, since the working machinery was now hidden, and one could focus without distraction on what mattered for the operator: the controls. In short, with seemingly simple means, Loewy had created a machine that both worked better and was more visually pleasing. In essence, Loewy’s approach was a sort of envelopment, which created both a “skin” and an “aura,” thereby subverting the “form follows function” mantra of much modern design. Streamlining was a central element of Loewy’s approach. A water droplet falling in air or a piece of ice floating down a stream will shape into a teardrop. It is a beautiful form found in nature, for example in fish or birds, that moves most efficiently through a resistant medium. Loewy proposed that it was also well suited for man-made mechanisms. Indeed, he proposed that in the development of man-made objects, such as locomotives or cars, there is a natural evolutionary progress that moves toward streamlining and simplification. Loewy was particularly proud of his redesign of the locomotives for the Pennsylvania Railroad, which he undertook in 1937. Earlier locomotives had been an irregular assortment of working parts: gears, levers, smokestacks, funnels, all sticking up and out in ungainly profusion. Loewy simplified all this, creating a great stainless-steel skin that was lifted up and over this ungainly surface, creating a simple, clean, unified, streamlined shape. After his success with locomotives, Loewy went on to apply a similar approach to tractors, buses, and steamboats. Streamlining—or “clean-lining”—makes it easier for objects to go fast, but it served other needs as well. Essentially, Loewy’s approach was a humanistic one: he made machinery and mechanisms virtually disappear and focused on the needs of the user and consumer. 404

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figure 182 Raymond Loewy, standing on the cowl of his famous S-1 locomotive, designed for the Pennsylvania Railroad. Taken at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Raymond LoewyTM. Image courtesy of Good Design LLC. www.RaymondLoewy.com.

In 1937, for example, for Cushman’s Bakery in New York, Loewy applied the idea of encapsulation to a storefront. He reduced the exterior of the store to a smooth streamlined shape, except for the display windows, which featured an array of mouthwatering cookies and cakes, luring the passerby to come inside. In the interior of their stores, bakers had traditionally displayed their goods on shelves on the back walls behind the counters. Loewy introduced curving glass counters, which pushed the store’s bakery products directly toward the customer, and which were placed exactly at eye level for children. Essentially, he created a world where nothing distracted from the product being sold. Still more radically, in 1937 Loewy applied the idea of encapsulation to Foley’s Department Store in Houston, Texas, creating a windowless emporium. This had two striking advantages. First, it made it possible to display many more goods, since it freed up space that had previously been used for windows for display. Second, it created an environment disconnected from the outside world, where nothing distracted from the act of shopping. The notion was that buyers would start on the top floor and then work their way down. And, so that RAYMOND LOEWY

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figure 183 Raymond Loewy, Cushman’s, 1937. Loewy created this prototype store for a bakery chain in New York in 1937. The white porcelain-covered steel siding and semicircular window endings give it an air of “radio deco.” Raymond LoewyTM. Image courtesy of Good Design LLC. www.RaymondLoewy.com.

shoppers would not be weighed down by the things they had decided to purchase, the store included a series of conveyer belts, which shoppers could use to send things to the cash register on the ground floor. This procedure made it hard to remember how many things one had decided to purchase, and surely many shoppers were a bit startled when they saw the size of the pile that was waiting for them at the cash register. The capsules in which Loewy wrapped his products were essentially a form of packaging, and this touches on one of the most important aspects of Loewy’s concept: the notion of branding. The basic idea was that products should have a completely unified, coordinated look, so that every encounter with them would reinforce their brand identity. In the case of the Pennsylvania Railroad, for example, Loewy not only designed the streamlined locomotives, but also designed the bar, the dining car, the lounge, and the seating areas in stream406

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lined and gleaming metallic décor. The seated passenger was not in an ordinary place, but in one consecrated to modernity and speed. Brand identity could also be asserted in other ways. One of the areas where Loewy was a pioneer was in the creation of modern corporate logos, which achieve a sort of streamlined communication. Their power depends on a delicate balance between a sort of austere blandness, which communicates corporate power, and a quirky element of some sort that makes them memorable. One of the most effective of his corporate logos is the one he created for Exxon; its double X’s create an unforgettable image and, in some subliminal way, also convey an aura of power. While art historians have focused on the achievements of Bauhaus design, the actual design of most products in the modern world follows different, largely contrary principles established by Raymond Loewy and followed by many American designers of the 1930s. They shared a vision of the future that is reflected to an extraordinary degree in today’s objects of daily use. Even new inventions, such as the computer and the iPhone, follow the design principles that these pioneers established. It’s time for the history of industrial design to be rewritten to recognize the significance of American industrial design, to recognize the significance of streamlining and encapsulation, and to give Raymond Loewy and the American designers who followed his lead the recognition they deserve. FOR FURTHER READING Loewy, Raymond. Industrial Design. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1979. . The Locomotive: Its Esthetics. London: “The Studio” Ltd., 1937. . Never Leave Well Enough Alone [autobiography]. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1951.

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ELIZABETH BROUN

DAVID BECK b. 1953, Muncie, Indiana d. 2018, San Francisco, California

David Beck: Intimate Worlds

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in a private collection in Washington, D.C. After admiring the de Koonings and Pollocks, I came faceto-face with a six-foot-tall sculpture in the shape of a pipe organ. When this curious instrument was “played” from a small keyboard, birds’ heads squawked atop the pipes, little tuxedoed men kicked bells, and—where one looked for pedals—pufferfish and crocodiles heaved for air. Nothing in my experience had prepared me for this hilarious object! After the high seriousness of the modernists, the strange creation, titled This Is Not a Pipe Organ (1984), charmed me with its insouciance and wacky joie de vivre. I soon met David Beck in person in San Francisco, where he took me to his favorite museum, the Musée Mécanique at Fisherman’s Wharf. He brought a roll of quarters and we spent the afternoon playing some of the two hundred coin-operated mechanical crank toys, automata, musical instruments, and whirligigs from a bygone era. David had many sources for his art, but I’ve always thought that “Laffing Sal,” “Susie the Can-Can Dancer,” and the labyrinthine ruins of the Sutro Baths were the most inspiring to him. He loved them for the fun they still offer, but he also knew he was reviving, for a fleeting instant, the joys experienced in the past, reminding us of inevitable loss. FIRST SAW DAVID BECK’S WORK

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David Beck played saxophone in a band called the Melancoholics, favoring a low-key style that expressed a laconic, even quizzical approach to life. He loved all the bizarre, unbelievable life-forms, especially fish and insects and amphibians, which nature offers in a dizzying array of models. His art is a mash-up of entertainment and nature, with each mesmerizing encounter reminding us to look more closely at the world around us and experience the wonder now, before it slips through our fingers. Beck’s chefs d’oeuvre offer variations on these themes. Band Shell (early 1980s, private collection), Movie Palace, and his summa, L’Opéra (1993–98, private collection), are intimate universes to discover over time. Everything is handmade, so each took years to complete, requiring him to master new techniques of painting and gilding, carving and casting, parchment-making and marquetry, lacquer and inlay with horn and bone. Movie Palace is a high-spirited salute to the silver screen, evoking “Egyptian” or “Moorish” movie temples of the 1920s. Stately columns are covered in crushed eggshell; a glass canopy is topped with water-gilt angels, peacock feathers, and crystal finials; carved bas-reliefs honor slapstick comedy, film noir, westerns, and biblical sagas; a ticket-seller stands at her booth near the candy counter. A cat’s cradle of gears and levers, when activated, brings all to life! Suddenly, rowdy audience members jeer and smooch and throw popcorn; flaming light fixtures flank the stage (made with whirring bits of silk); and a stage curtain rises to reveal a projection of King Kong on the screen (an elaborate mirror reflection). The mechanics of all this can be glimpsed through a secret window below, allowing a peek into the mysteries. This is Beck as the Wizard of Oz. L’Opéra is an elegant, deco-style tour de force in ebony and gold, with a glass dome topped by a gilt dragon. Verdi’s Aida is on stage, with dancing girls doing classic “Egyptian” moves. The audience includes assorted characters from other great operas, as well as the usual number of snoring patrons. Gears animate all the elements into the kind of Gesamtkunstwerk that opera always aspires to be. On an affixed scroll appears his carved signature along with the inscription “Travail d’un seul homme” (Work of a single man), lest we imagine he had assistants in creating this personal “folly.” MVSEVM is an extended meditation on the peculiar habit of collecting strange and precious things from various cultures—that is, on museums themselves. The ensemble is based on the 180-year history of the noble Patent Office Building in Washington, now home to the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery. We see artifacts from the Wilkes Expedition, natural history specimens, Catlin’s Indian Gallery, patent models (doubling as artists’ signature objects), portraits, eye-miniatures (which Beck described as an in-joke about government surveillance), and more, each item lovingly created by hand, using the whole artists’ inventory of materials and techniques. Dodo Museum (1980, Estate of David Beck) is entirely covered with feathers on the exterior, which encloses a monumental carved dodo skeleton. The whole constitutes a shrine for what Beck called “this disastrously trusting bird” that was quickly annihilated by early European explorers, among the first in a long line of extinctions wrought by modern man. The dodo is the avatar for Beck himself, another “disastrously trusting bird.” Throughout Beck’s career, dodos recur as meticulous large drawings, tiny carvings, metal stickpins, and a series DAVID BECK

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figure 184 David Beck, Movie Palace, 1990. Mixed media construction, 84 × 40 × 22 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gift of Ken and Judy Siebel and museum purchase through the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 2000.27. Courtesy of Hackett Mill, Representative of the Estate of David Beck.

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figure 185 David Beck, MVSEVM, 2006. Mixed media construction, 32 × 55 × 50 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum. Gift of Thelma and Melvin Lenkin, 2006.8. © 2006 David Beck. Courtesy of Hackett Mill, Representative of the Estate of David Beck.

of seven bronzes of preening dodos on pedestals, called Dodos en Suite (2010, Smithsonian American Art Museum). It’s as if Beck sought to repopulate nature with his own proliferating dodos, reversing extinction. Many works are tiny, intended for private collections, but still so labor intensive that one wonders if Beck had extra hours in his day. Fish, animals, and figures are shrunk to the intimate scale he thought created immediacy and focus for the viewer. One time when he came to Washington, he said, “I brought new works to show you.” He reached in his pocket and pulled out a plain one-inch wooden cube with hinged facets, called Poissoncardré (ca. 2000, Estate of David Beck). One by one, the facets were flipped, until the entire cube was reassembled inside out, revealing a speckled boxfish bursting through the planes. Beck made almost everything smaller than life, except for insects, which he enlarged for greater presence. Dragonflies and moths, their wings and bodies set in motion with wires linked to tiny hand cranks, became graceful flying ballerinas. Beck expanded into video to record these creatures flying to music. Mothcanique (1999, Estate of David Beck) and Dragonflycanique recall in their titles the old Musée Mécanique, but these automata soar into a spirit realm, flitting by for a brief season. DAVID BECK

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figure 186 David Beck, Dragonflycanique, 2014. Boxwood, cherry, brass mechanism, oil pigments, 15 ½ × 6 × 7 in. Courtesy of Hackett Mill, Representative of the Estate of David Beck.

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Each small Beck treasure dazzles through its extravagant lavishing of skill and labor, as if to compress loving devotion to its extreme, like a diamond. I am more than just admiring of Beck’s massive investment of work in such seeming trifles. It causes me to question the ethical basis of my own too-casual approach to life; I feel I’m just skating across the surface and missing the marvels around me. Beck said, “I don’t like to repeat myself. And I like to experiment a lot with different techniques and different things. I want to do everything, basically. I’d like to learn how to do everything. . . . That’s what inspires me.” He also said, “I wanted to make something kind of precious, because I have strong feelings for those kinds of things. There was a thing about getting away from art being precious. I never liked that idea. I thought, ‘Why shouldn’t it be precious? Why shouldn’t it be something that’s taken care of?’ ”1 Art dealer Allan Stone first discovered Beck’s genius in 1975 and, until his death in 2006, gave Beck the financial security to create at his own pace. Stone also introduced the artist to key patrons. Now Beck’s estate is in the capable hands of the Hackett Mill Gallery in San Francisco, his home for thirty years. Beck’s art is championed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and was shown at the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, MoMA PS1, and other museums across the country. Collectors prize his works highly and count Beck among the great artists. Still, Olympia Stone has said that “David Beck is . . . the smartest, most creative artist you’ve never heard of.”2 Beck is in that fragile category of “cult artist,” liable to fall victim to one of the art world’s frequent mass extinctions of worthy reputations. Beck’s artworks would be more at home in a medieval treasury or a cabinet of curiosities; they are uncomfortable in modern art galleries. One must have confidence to embrace Beck in an era still dominated by elite abstraction, irony, and “cool.” So, here’s our challenge now: to take care of the vulnerable artworks of this precious genius and keep his star shining brightly in the firmament. Let’s make sure that the artworks are preserved, well maintained and fully functioning, and on view whenever possible. Let’s make David Beck a well-discovered genius! NOTES 1.  Video by Smithsonian American Art Museum of David Beck talking about MVSEVM, 2006, https:// americanart.si.edu/artwork/mvsevm-75590. 2.  Olympia Stone, dir., Curious Worlds: The Art & Imagination of David Beck, 2014 (documentary, Floating Stone Productions). Additional information and views of Beck artworks are available online: This Is Not a Pipe Organ: http://davidbeckartworks.com/this-is-not-a-pipe-organ Movie Palace: https://americanart.si.edu/artwork/movie-palace-46600 L’Opéra: http://davidbeckartworks.com/l-opera MVSEVM: http://davidbeckartworks.com/mvsevm Dodo Museum: http://davidbeckartworks.com/dodomuseum Poissoncardré: http://davidbeckartworks.com/poissoncardre Dragonflycanique: http://davidbeckartworks.com/dragonflycanique

DAVID BECK

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

it right: No man is an island. And no author works alone. Books cannot appear without the help of many allies. In the case of this anthology, I am particularly grateful to the colleagues who generously shared their responses to the challenging question posed, and for their keen insights on American art and artists. I am also indebted to Dr. Kirsten Pai Buick for her thoughtful introduction to the collection. Numerous associates at museums and archives, as well as collectors and dealers, helped with provision of illustrations for the essays. Their kindness is greatly appreciated, as is the exceptional assistance of the tireless Kathy Borgogno, who managed the complicated but vital business of locating images and securing permissions for their publication. The suggestions from anonymous outside readers were helpful in shaping the final texts. At UC Press, I was greatly assisted by Archna Patel, Art History Editor, Jessica Moll, Senior Production Editor, and their associates. The talents and dedication of their team was essential to the realization of this enterprise. The enthusiastic support of my agent, Sandra Dijkstra, has from the outset been vital to progress on this work. On the home front, this project could never have been completed without the loving support, and unlimited patience, of my wife and family. Thank you all. JOHN DONNE HAD

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Finally, I am indebted to Eleanor Heartney, whose review of the artist’s exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, prompted the provocative question, “Who’s your Hyman Bloom?” It then seems only fitting that this volume be dedicated to that fine artist’s memory. cce

416

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acknowledgments

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CONTRIBUTORS

henry adams is the Ruth Coulter Heede Professor of Art History at Case Western Reserve University. julie aronson is curator of American paintings, sculpture, and drawings at the Cincinnati Art Museum. renée ater is associate professor emerita of art history at the University of Maryland. rebecca bedell is professor of art history at Wellesley College. wendy bellion holds the Sewell C. Biggs Chair in American Art History at the University of Delaware. graham c. boettcher is the R. Hugh Daniel Director of the Birmingham Museum of Art. elizabeth broun is director emerita of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. kirsten pai buick is professor of art history at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. amanda c. burdan is curator at the Brandywine River Museum of Art. sarah burns is professor emerita of art history at Indiana University Bloomington.

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dennis carr is the Virginia Steele Scott Chief Curator of American Art at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California. derrick cartwright is associate professor of art history and director of University Galleries at the University of San Diego, and director of curatorial affairs at the Timken Museum. david cateforis is professor of art history at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. carol clark is the William McCall Vickery 1957 Professor Emerita of art history at Amherst College. lucia colombari is assistant professor of art history in the Weitzenhoffer Family College of Fine Arts, University of Oklahoma. andrew connors is director of the Albuquerque Museum of Art. robert cozzolino is the Patrick and Aimee Butler Curator of Paintings at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. josef diaz, an independent scholar, is former executive director and chief curator of the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. bram dijkstra is professor emeritus of American and comparative literature at the University of California, San Diego. erika doss is professor of American studies at Notre Dame University. charles c. eldredge is the Hall Distinguished Professor of American Art and Culture Emeritus at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. betsy fahlman is professor of art history at Arizona State University. ruth fine is curator of special projects emerita at the National Gallery of Art. ilene susan fort is curator emerita, American art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. anne collins goodyear is co-director of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art. randall c. griffin is University Distinguished Professor at Southern Methodist University. melanee c. harvey is assistant professor of art history at Howard University. barbara haskell is curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art. patricia hills is professor emerita of art history at Boston University. erica hirshler is the Coll Senior Curator of American Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. elizabeth hutchinson is associate professor of art history at Barnard College. patricia junker is the Ann M. Barwick Curator of American Art Emerita at the Seattle Art Museum. maki kaneko is associate professor of art history at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. paul karlstrom is West Coast regional director emeritus for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. wendy katz is professor of art history at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

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contributors

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elizabeth kornhauser is the Alice Pratt Brown Curator of American Paintings and Sculpture at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. lara kuykendall is associate professor of art history at Ball State University. jason lafountain is the higher education and development coordinator at Chicago’s Prison + Neighborhood Arts/Education Project. anthony w. lee is the Idella Plimpton Kendall Professor of Art History at Mount Holyoke College. michael lobel is professor of art history at Hunter College and at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. margaretta markle lovell holds the Jay D. McEvoy Chair in the History of American Art at the University of California, Berkeley. david m. lubin is the Charlotte C. Weber Professor of Art History at Wake Forest University. katherine manthorne is professor of art history at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. anna marley is the Kenneth R. Woodcock Curator of Historical American Art at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. patricia mcdonnell is director emerita of the Wichita Art Museum. richard meyer is the Robert and Ruth Halperin Professor in Art History at Stanford University. angela miller is professor of art history and archaeology at Washington University in Saint Louis. alexander nemerov is the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Stanford University. travis nygard is associate professor of art history and director of the Caestecker Art Gallery at Ripon College. austin porter is associate professor of art history at Kenyon College. susan rather is the Meredith and Cornelia Long Chair in Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin. jeffrey richmond-moll is curator of American art at the Georgia Museum of Art. amy scott is executive vice president of research and interpretation and the Marion B. and Calvin R. Cross Curator of Visual Arts at the Autry Museum of the American West. scott a. shields is associate director and chief curator at the Crocker Art Museum. thomas brent smith is Wylodean and Bill Saxon Director of the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma. gaylord torrence is the Fred and Virginia Merrill Senior Curator of American Indian Art Emeritus at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. leslie umberger is curator of folk and self-taught art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

CONTRIBUTORS

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alan wallach is the Ralph H. Wark Professor Emeritus at the College of William and Mary. shipu wang is professor of art history and Coats Family Chair at the University of California, Merced. jason weems is associate professor of art history at the University of California, Riverside. mark a. white is the executive director of the New Mexico Museum of Art. cécile whiting is Chancellor’s Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine. alona c. wilson, an independent scholar and curator, was formerly chief curator at the Museum of African American History in Boston. kristina wilson is professor of art history at Clark University. rebecca zurier is associate professor of art history at the University of Michigan.

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contributors

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ILLUSTRATIONS

1.

Wood Gaylor, Rites of Spring, 1916.  /  xiv

2.

Hyman Bloom, The Hull, 1952.  /  xv

3.

Fitz Henry Lane, The Western Shore with Norman’s Woe, 1862.  /  xvii

4.

Robert Swain Gifford, Near the Coast, ca. 1885.  /  xviii

5.

Ruth Asawa, Untitled, ca. 1960–69.  /  xx

6.

Howardena Pindell, Art Crow/Jim Crow, 1988.  /  2

7.

Edmonia Lewis, Forever Free, 1867.  /  6

8.

Thomas Crawford, Progress of Civilization, 1863.  /  7

9.

Howardena Pindell, Autobiography: Water/Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family Ghosts, 1988.  /  8

10.

Unknown artist, Francis Williams, the Scholar of Jamaica, ca. 1745.  /  16

11.

William Williams, Benjamin Lay, ca. 1750–58.  /  17

12.

William Williams, William Hall, 1766.  /  18

13.

José Campeche y Jordán, La Natividad, ca. 1799.  /  23

14.

José Campeche y Jordán, Dama a caballo (Lady on Horseback), 1785.  /  24

15.

John Greenwood, Jersey Nanny, 1748.  /  28

16.

John Greenwood, Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam, ca. 1752–58.  /  29

17.

John Greenwood, Portrait of a Naval Officer with a Coastal Map and Binoculars in Hand, 1760.  /  30

18.

Sarah Goodridge, Beauty Revealed, 1828.  /  34

19.

Sarah Goodridge, Self-Portrait, 1830.  /  36

20.

Sarah Goodridge, Daniel Webster, 1827.  /  37 421

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21.

422

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Charles Deas, Walking the Chalk, 1838.  /  40

22.

Charles Deas, Winnebago (Wa-kon-cha-hi-re-ga) in a Bark Lodge, 1842.  /  42

23.

Charles Deas, The Wounded Pawnee, 1845.  /  43

24.

William Walcutt, Simon Kenton’s Ride, ca. 1859.  /  45

25.

William Walcutt, illustration from Parke Godwin, Vala: A Mythological Tale, ca. 1851  /  46

26.

William Walcutt, Deerslayer at the Shooting Match, ca. 1853  /  48

27.

Elizabeth Nourse, A Mother (Une mère), 1888.  /  51

28.

Elizabeth Nourse, The First Communion (La première communion), 1895.  /  53

29.

Elizabeth Nourse, Summer Hours (Les heures d’été), ca. 1924.  /  55

30.

Attributed to Ella Ferris Pell, He Is Risen!, 1883.  /  59

31.

Ella Ferris Pell, Salomé, 1890.  /  60

32.

Unidentified photographer, Ella Ferris Pell, n.d.  /  61

33.

Theodore Wores, Chinese Restaurant, 1884.  /  66

34.

Theodore Wores, The Iris Flowers of Hori Kiri, Tokio, ca. 1893.  /  67

35.

Theodore Wores, The Lei Maker, 1901.  /  68

36.

Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, The Market, ca. 1905.  /  74

37.

Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, In Rittenhouse Square, ca. 1909.  /  75

38.

Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones, Shop Girls, ca. 1912.  /  76

39.

Unidentified photographer, Meta Warrick Fuller, ca. 1919.  /  79

40.

Meta Warrick Fuller, Ethiopia Awakening, 1921.  /  80

41.

Meta Warrick Fuller, The Wretched, 1902.  /  82

42.

Gabriel Moulin, Arthur Putnam (sketching in his notebook), early twentieth century.  /  85

43.

Arthur Putnam, Snarling Jaguar, 1906–09.  /  87

44.

Arthur Putnam, Puma on Guard, n.d.  /  88

45.

Margaret Sutermeister, Postmortem Photograph of an Infant Held by Two Women and a Girl, n.d.  /  91

46.

Margaret Sutermeister, Asian Laundryman, n.d.  /  93

47.

Bill Traylor, Untitled (Legs Construction with Blue Man), ca. 1940–42.  /  98

48.

Bill Traylor, Untitled (Red Goat with Snake), ca. 1940–42.  /  99

49.

Bill Traylor, Untitled (Seated Woman), ca. 1940–42.  /  100

50.

Morris Hirshfield, Angora Cat, 1937.  /  103

51.

Morris Hirshfield, Nude at the Window (Hot Night in July), 1941.  /  104

52.

Installation view of the exhibition The Paintings of Morris Hirshfield, 1943.  /  105

53.

Gerald Nailor, Navajo Woman and Colt, 1938.  /  110

54.

Gerald Nailor, Untitled, 1937.  /  111

55.

Gerald Nailor, The History and Progress of the Navajo Nation, 1942.  /  112

56.

Doris Lee, Thanksgiving, 1935.  /  116

57.

Doris Lee, Grauman’s Chinese Theater, 1945.  /  117

58.

Doris Lee, Oranges and Avocados, ca. 1950s.  /  118

59.

Philip Evergood, My Forebears Were Pioneers, 1939.  /  121

60.

Philip Evergood, Through the Mill, 1940.  /  123

61.

Ernest L. Blumenschein, Superstition, 1921.  /  126

62.

Ernest L. Blumenschein, Jury for Trial of a Sheepherder for Murder, 1936.  /  128

63.

Frederick C. Flemister, Self-Portrait, 1941.  /  132

64.

Frederick C. Flemister, Man with a Brush, ca. 1941.  /  135

illustrations

22-05-31 10:16 AM

65.

Frederick C. Flemister, The Mourners, ca. 1942.  /  136

66.

Miki Hayakawa, One Afternoon, ca. 1935.  /  139

67.

Miki Hayakawa, Music, ca. 1934.  /  140

68.

Miki Hayakawa, Untitled (Woman with Blue Hair), ca. 1940s.  /  142

69.

Belle Baranceanu, Leaf Bud, ca. 1925.  /  145

70.

Belle Baranceanu, Los Angeles Hills, 1929.  /  147

71.

Belle Baranceanu, Lee, ca. 1931.  /  148

72.

Chuzo Tamotzu, Still Life with Newspaper, 1931.  /  151

73.

Chuzo Tamotzu, Summer Relief, 1939.  /  153

74.

Chuzo Tamotzu, Beware of Militarism, 1939.  /  154

75.

Robert Neal, The Petrified Forest, 1962.  /  158

76.

Robert Neal, Rearguard, 1950.  /  160

77.

Hughie Lee-Smith, Boy with Tire, 1952.  /  163

78.

Hughie Lee-Smith, Man with Balloons, 1960.  /  164

79.

Hughie Lee-Smith, The Bridge, before 1968.  /  165

80.

Charles Henry Alston, installation image of The Negro in California History—Exploration and Colonization, ca. 1949.  /  170

81.

Charles Henry Alston, Painting, 1950.  /  171

82.

Charles Henry Alston, The Family, 1955.  /  172

83.

Paul F. Keene Jr., Clarinet Player, 1955.  /  177

84.

Paul F. Keene Jr., Street Quartet, 1990.  /  178

85.

Paul F. Keene Jr., Generations, 1996.  /  179

86.

Larry Day, After Steen, 1962.  /  184

87.

Larry Day, Changes, 1982.  /  185

88.

Larry Day, Three Worlds, 1989.  /  186

89A–B. May Stevens, two-page spread from Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics, no. 1 (January 1977).  /  190–91 90.

May Stevens, The Artist’s Studio (After Courbet), 1974.  /  192

91.

Gay Block, May Stevens, 1999.  /  193

92.

Christina Ramberg, Untitled, ca. 1975.  /  197

93.

Christina Ramberg, Black Widow, 1971.  /  198

94.

Christina Ramberg, Schizophrenic Discovery, 1977.  /  199

95.

Benny Andrews visiting his old home in Plainview, Georgia, n.d.  /  204

96.

Benny Andrews, On the Right, 1972.  /  205

97.

Benny Andrews, The Thrust, 1972.  /  206

98.

Jerome Caja, Bozo Fucks Death, 1988.  /  211

99.

Jerome Caja, The Annunciation, ca. 1995.  /  213

100.

Jerome Caja, Venus in Cleveland, 1995.  /  214

101.

Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, Cat Looking at Fish, ca. 2001.  /  217

102.

Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, Hiroshima, 2001.  /  219

103.

Jimmy Tsutomu Mirikitani, Untitled (Grapes for Pollock), ca. 2001–06.  /  220

104.

Harry Fonseca, The Discovery of Gold in California series, 1997.  /  225

105.

Harry Fonseca, Coyote on the Streets, 1994.  /  227

106.

Harry Fonseca, American Dream Machine, 2005.  /  228

ILLUSTRATIONS

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423

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424

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107.

Ferdinand Thomas Lee Boyle, Eliza Greatorex, 1869.  /  234

108.

Eliza Greatorex, The Pond at Cernay La Ville, 1880.  /  235

109.

Eliza Greatorex, St. Paul’s Church, 1875.  /  237

110.

Arthur Wesley Dow, Silhouetted Trees, ca. 1895–1910.  /  241

111.

Arthur Wesley Dow, The Mirror, 1916.  /  242

112.

Arthur Wesley Dow, Rain in May, ca. 1907.  /  243

113.

Carrie Hill portrait, 1923.  /  246

114.

Carrie Hill, In the Foothills of the Pyrenees, 1922.  /  247

115.

Carrie Hill, Old Mill at Mountain Brook, 1928.  /  249

116.

Albert Bloch, Winter, 1918.  /  254

117.

Albert Bloch, Passing Train, 1947–48.  /  256

118.

Marvin Cone, Old Quarry—Stone City, 1936.  /  259

119.

Marvin Cone, Prelude, 1931.  /  261

120.

Marvin Cone, Inner Light, 1950.  /  262

121.

Edith Hamlin, Maynard Dixon, Painter of the Desert, 1940.  /  266

122.

Edith Hamlin, The Grand Canyon, 1947.  /  267

123.

Edith Hamlin, The Eagle Dance at Taos, 1947.  /  268

124.

Constance Coleman Richardson, Streetlight, 1930.  /  271

125.

Constance Coleman Richardson, The Ornithologist, 1945.  /  273

126.

Bob Ross working at easel, n.d.  /  276

127.

Bob Ross, Mountain Stream, 1986.  /  277

128.

Davy T. “Painterman” (Davy Turner), The Bald Eagle Mountain, 2013.  /  279

129.

George Washington Carver, Yucca, Angustifolia and Cactus, 1892–94.  /  285

130.

George Washington Carver with painting of white Mentzelia flowers, ca. 1900–20.  /  286

131.

Hobson Pittman, Miss Pat and Miss Eva Lyon, ca. 1943.  /  290

132.

Hobson Pittman, The Widow, 1937.  /  291

133.

Hobson Pittman, The Departure, ca. 1950.  /  292

134.

Priscilla Roberts, The Attic Scene, 1946–47.  /  295

135.

Priscilla Roberts, In the Attic, 1949.  /  296

136.

Priscilla Roberts, Self-Portrait, 1946.  /  298

137.

Brian Connelly, A Night Garden, 1955.  /  302

138.

Brian Connelly, The Spectrum, 1952.  /  303

139.

Brian Connelly with his painting David Homer, 1954.  /  304

140.

Athos Casarini, “The Futurist Hears the Call of War,” The World Magazine, August 15, 1915.  /  310

141.

Athos Casarini, New York Seen from Brooklyn, 1911.  /  312

142.

Athos Casarini, War at Austria, 1915.  /  314

143.

Agnes Pelton, Being, 1923–26.  /  317

144.

Agnes Pelton, Mother of Silence, 1933.  /  319

145.

Agnes Pelton, Orbits, 1934.  /  320

146.

Helen Torr, Geometric, before 1924.  /  325

147.

Helen Torr, Light House (White Cloud), 1932.  /  326

148.

Helen Torr, Evening Sounds, ca. 1925–30.  /  327

149.

Vicci Sperry, Brief Encounter in the Orange Grove, 1976.  /  332

150.

Vicci Sperry, Child with Red Face, 1966.  /  333

illustrations

22-05-31 10:16 AM

151.

Vicci Sperry, Springtime Emergence, 1984.  /  334

152.

Rico Lebrun, Vertical Composition, 1945.  /  339

153.

Rico Lebrun, Genesis, 1960.  /  340

154.

Edward Hagedorn, Green Mountains, Pale Lightning, 1935.  /  345

155.

Edward Hagedorn, Cobalt Mountains, Green Sea, 1936.  /  346

156.

Edward Hagedorn, The Rainbow, ca. 1938.  /  347

157.

Olinka Hrdy, Studies for Tulsa Riverside Studio Murals, 1928–29.  /  350

158.

Olinka Hrdy, Cartoon for the Tulsa Convention Hall Curtain, ca. 1930.  /  351

159.

Olinka Hrdy, Design (Exposition Park), or A Mysterious Shadow on Five Forms, 1934.  /  352

160.

Charles J. Biederman, Cubist Self-Portrait, Chicago, January 1932, 1932.  /  356

161.

Charles J. Biederman, Untitled, New York, June 1936, 1936.  /  357

162.

Charles J. Biederman, #24 Constable, 1977–79.  /  359

163.

Vera Berdich, The Masked Ball, 1959.  /  363

164.

Vera Berdich, Brain Box, 1973.  /  364

165.

Vera Berdich, Caucus Race, from Alice in Wonderland series, 1962.  /  365

166.

George Morrison, Collage IX: Landscape, 1974.  /  368

167.

George Morrison, Untitled, 1960.  /  370

168.

George Morrison, Untitled, 1973.  /  371

169.

Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, Mapa de la parte interna de la Nuevo México, ca. 1758.  /  376

170.

Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, San Raphael Archangel, 1780.  /  378

171.

Bernardo Miera y Pacheco, La Castrense (Altar screen dedicated to Our Lady of Light), 1761.  /  379

172.

John Joseph Holland, “Design for a Side Chapel in the Gothic Style,” for Adelmorn the Outlaw,

173.

John Evers, John Joseph Holland, 1819.  /  384

174.

Martha Ann Honeywell, Cut-paper Card with The Lord’s Prayer, ca. 1830.  /  387

175.

Martha Ann Honeywell, Cut-paper Card with The Lord’s Prayer (center detail), ca. 1830.  /  388

176.

Meskwaki artist, Bag, ca. 1850.  /  393

177.

A ski ba kwa, Meskwaki, Bag, ca. 1890.  /  394

178.

A ski ba kwa, Meskwaki, reverse of Bag, ca. 1890.  /  395

1802.  /  383

179.

Sarah Wyman Whitman, Roses—Souvenir de Villier le bel, 1879.  /  399

180.

Sarah Wyman Whitman, Peace and Honor, 1900.  /  400

181.

Sarah Wyman Whitman, Cover Design for Charles Dudley Warner’s “Being a Boy,” 1897.  /  401

182.

Raymond Loewy, standing on the cowl of his famous S-1 locomotive, 1939.  /  405

183.

Raymond Loewy, Cushman’s, 1937.  /  406

184.

David Beck, Movie Palace, 1990.  /  410

185.

David Beck, MVSEVM, 2006.  /  411

186.

David Beck, Dragonflycanique, 2014.  /  412

ILLUSTRATIONS

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INDEX

Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (Gibson), 368 abstract expressionism: Dennis Carr, 337–42; Larry Day, 183; Edward Hagedorn, 343–48; Vicci Sperry, 330–36 abstraction: Charles Alston, 169, 171, 173; Belle Baranceanu, 146; Charles Biederman, 354–60; Dennis Carr, 337–42; Athos Casarini, 309–15; Larry Day, 183; Arthur Wesley Dow and, 244; Olinka Hrdy, 349–53; Paul F. Keene, 175, 176, 180; Doris Emrick Lee, 119; George Morrison, 367–72; Agnes Pelton, 316–22; Helen Torr, 323–29 Abstract Painting in America (exhibition; Whitney Museum of American Art), 355 Adam (Pell), 58 Adams, Henry (author), 397 Adams, Henry (critic), xiv, 403–7 Adams, John, 27 aesthetic movement: George Washington Carver and, 283, 284; Arthur Wesley Dow and, 240

af Klint, Hilma, 321, 335, 336n6 African American Art (Lewis), 78 After Steen (Day), 183, 184 Agee, William C., xix Agnes Dei (Pell), 61 Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist (exhibition; Whitney Museum of American Art), 321 Agni Yoga, 318 agnotology, 3, 9, 10n5 Ahme in Egypt (Pelton), 321 Ahumada, Agustín de, 377 Alabama Creates: 200 Years of Art and Artists (exhibition), 250 Alexander, Bill, 278 Alexander, John White, 64 Alexander, Mary L., 54 Alloway, Lawrence, 188 Alston, Charles Henry, 165, 168–74; The Family, 172, 173; The History of the Negro in California—Exploration and Colonization, 169, 170; Painting, 169, 171, 173

427

64432int.indd 427

22-05-31 10:16 AM

American Dream Machine (Fonseca), 228, 229 American Gothic (Wood), 115, 259 An American Group, 152, 154 American Indian Movement (AIM), 368, 369 American Painting Today (exhibition; Metropolitan Museum of Art), 169, 173 American Realists and Magic Realists (exhibition; Museum of Modern Art), 299 Americans in Paris 1860–1900 (exhibition; National Gallery, London/Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), 51 Americans in Spain: Painting and Travel, 1820–1920 (exhibition; Chrysler Museum/Milwaukee Art Museum), 250 Anderson, John and Eugenie, 358 Anderson, Marian, 159 Anderson, Susan B., 155 Andrews, Benny, 202–8, 204; Artist as Artist, 204; “Bicentennial Series,” 203; “Decentralization: The Greening of American Art,” 202; Janitors at Rest, 203; The Long Rows, 203; On the Right, 205, 206–7; Portrait of a Collagist, 204; Southern Pasture, 203; Studio, 204; Symbols, 203–4; Teaching in Prison, 204; The Thrust, 206, 207 Andrews, George, 203 Andrews, Raymond, 207n6 Andromeda (Pell), 58 Angarola, Anthony, 144, 145–46 The Angel Making Adam See the Consequences of His Sin (Pell), 58 Angora Cat (Hirshfield), 103, 103 The Annunciation (Caja), 212, 213 Anshutz, Thomas, 73 Architecture and Democracy (Bragdon), 349–50 Armory Show (1913), 87, 127, 240, 248, 311, 316 Aronson, Julie, 50–56 Arp, Jean, 355 Art and Life in America (Larkin), 120 Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge (Biederman), 358, 360 Art Crow/Jim Crow (Pindell), 1, 2 art deco: Olinka Hrdy and, 349; Raymond Loewy, 403 The Art Experience (Sperry), 331–32, 335 Arthur Putnam (sketching in his notebook) (Moulin), 85 Artist as Artist (Andrews), 204 artists of color, marginalization of, 96–97, 166; art canon and, 81; legal restrictions and, 152; research on, 1, 3; subject matter and, 159. See also specific artists and works

428

64432int.indd 428

The Artist’s Studio (After Courbet) (Stevens), 192, 193 Art of the Great Lakes Indians (exhibition), 391 Art of the New South: Women Artists of Birmingham 1890–1950 (exhibition; Birmingham Historical Society), 250 Arts and Crafts movement: Arthur Wesley Dow and, 240; Sarah Wyman Whitman and, 401–2 The Art Spirit (Henri), 331 Art Workers’ Coalition, 202 Asawa, Ruth, xix, xxi; Untitled (S.108 Hanging, Six-Lobed, Multi-Layered Continuous Form Within a Form), xx Ashcan School, 75 Ashton, Dore, 120, 122 Asian-American artists. See artists of color, marginalization of; specific artists and works Asian Laundryman (Sutermeister), 92, 93 A Ski Ba Kwa, 391–96; Bag (ca. 1890), 394, 395 astrology, 318 Ater, Renée, 78–83 The Attic Scene (Roberts), 294, 295 Attraction (Connelly), 303 autiobiography, 7, 8, 9 Autobiography: Water (Ancestors/Middle Passage/Family Ghosts) (Pindell), 7, 8, 9 automata, 411, 412 avant-garde: Charles Biederman and, 355; Brian Connelly and, 305; Morris Hirshfield and, 103, 107. See also futurism Azbill, Henry, 226 Bacchus (Putnam), 87 Bag (A Ski Ba Kwa), 394, 395 Bag (Meskwaki artist), 393 Bailey, David, 81 The Bald Eagle Mountain (“Painterman”), 279 Balla, Giacomo, 313 Bancroft, Hubert Howe, 224 Band Shell (Beck), 409 Bannister, Edward M., 165 Baranceanu, Belle (Goldschlager), 144–49; From Everett Street, Los Angeles, 147; German Town, 149; Leaf Bud, 145, 146; Lee, 148, 149; Los Angeles Hills, 147, 147, 149; Riverview Section, Chicago, 146; Scenic View of the Village, 149; self-portrait, 144–45; Virginia, 146; Wabash Avenue Bridge, 149 Baranik, Rudolf, 188, 189, 194 Barr, Alfred, 106 Baskin, Leonard, 337

INDEX

22-05-31 10:16 AM

Bauhaus, 349, 407 Baur, John I. H., xvi, xviii, 122, 123 Bearden, Romare, 165 Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African American Women Artists (Robinson), 62 Beauty Revealed (Goodridge), 33–34, 34, 37–38 Beaux Arts, 125 Bébé Marie (Cornell), 297 Beck, David, 408–13; Band Shell, 409; Dodo Museum, 409; Dodos en Suite, 409, 411; Dragonflycanique, 411, 412; L’Opéra, 409; Mothcanique, 411; Movie Palace, 509, 510; MVSEVM, 409, 411; Poissoncardré, 411; This Is Not a Pipe Organ, 408 Bedell, Rebecca, 239–44 Being (Pelton), 317, 318 Bellion, Wendy, 381–85 Benjamin, Tritobia Hayes, 81 Bentley, William, 388–89 Benton, Thomas Hart, 113, 134, 259, 260, 261, 262 Berdich, Vera, 361–66; Brain Box, 364; Caucus Race, 365; The Masked Ball, 363 Berger, John, 123 Berggruen, Heinz, 346–47 Berman, Eugene, 164 Berman, Greta, 297 Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor (exhibition; Smithsonian American Art Museum), 97, 99, 101 Beware of Militarism (Tamotzu), 152, 154, 154 “Bicentennial Series” (Andrews), 203 Biederman, Charles, 354–60; Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge (book), 358, 360; Cubist Self-Portrait, Chicago, January 1932, 356; #24 Constable, 359; Untitled, New York, June 1936, 357 Bierstadt, Albert, 231 Bing, Siegfried, 82 Binion, MacArthur, 131 biomorphic abstraction, 355 Bishop, John Peale, 294 Black artists. See artists of color, marginalization of; specific artists and works Black Arts Movement, 165–66 Black Emergency Cultural Coalition, 202, 206 Black Folk Art in America: 1930–1980 (exhibition; Corcoran Gallery of Art), 97 Blackshear, Kathleen, 363 Black Widow (Ramberg), 197, 198, 200 Blandy, Doug, 279 Blavatsky, Helena, 318

Bloch, Albert, 252–57; Passing Train, 255–56, 256; Winter, 253, 254 Bloch, Anna Francis, 255 Block, Gay, May Stevens, 193 Bloom, Hyman, xiii–xvi, 337; The Hull, xv The Blue Rider, 252 Blumenschein, Ernest L., 125–30; Jury for Trial of a Sheepherder for Murder, 127, 128, 129; Superstition, 126–27, 126, 129 Boal, Iain, 3 Boettcher, Graham C., 245–51 Bohemian Club (San Francisco), 69 Bohm, David, 358 Boldini, Giovanni, 84 Bolotowsky, Ilya, 355 Bonestell, Chesley, xxi book design, 401–2, 401 Booth, Mary Louise, 236 Bouras, Harry, 363 Boyle, Ferdinand Thomas Lee, Eliza Greatorex, 234 Boy on the Rooftop (Lee-Smith), 165 Boy with Tire (Lee-Smith), 163 Bozo Fucks Death (Caja), 211, 212 Braderman, Joan, 192 Bragdon, Claude, 349–50 Brain Box (Berdich), 364 Brancusi, Constantin, 355 Braude, Ann, 336n6 Brennan, Marcia, xiv The Bridge (Lee-Smith), 164–65, 165 Broun, Elizabeth, 408–13 Brown, David J., 35 Browne, George Elmer, 245–46, 249 Buchenwald Cart (Lebrun), 341 Buchenwald Pit (Lebrun), 341 Buck, Claude, xxi Budd, Etta, 284 Buick, Kirsten Pai, 1–10 Burdan, Amanda, 114–19 Burke, Mary Alice Heekin, 52 Burke, Selma, 81 Burns, Sarah, 289–93 Burton, Scott, 183 Bustamante, Juan Domingo, 377 Cadmus, Paul, 134, 305 Caja, Jerome David, 209–15; The Annunciation, 212, 213; Bozo Fucks Death, 211, 212; Charles Devouring

INDEX

64432int.indd 429

429

22-05-31 10:16 AM

Caja, Jerome David (continued) Himself, 210; The Last Hand Job, 212; Venus in Cleveland, 214, 215 Calder, Alexander, Circus, 355 California, 86, 87 Campbell, Mary Schmidt, 81 Campeche y Jordán, José, 20–25; Dama a caballo (Lady on Horseback), 24; La Natividad, 22, 23 Campendonk, Heinrich, 253 Cannon, T. C., 225–26 Canyon of Flame and Storm (Hamlin), 264 Caribou, Walter, 369 Carlson, Elizabeth, 74 Carr, Dennis, 337–42 Carroll, Lewis, 363 Carter, Sarah, 291 Cartoon for the Tulsa Convention Hall Curtain (Hrdy), 351 Cartwright, Derrick, 57–63 Carver, George Washington, 283–88, 286; Yucca, Angustifolia and Cactus, 284, 285 Carving the Map of China (Tamotzu), 151–52 Casarini, Athos, 309–15; Crime, 311; “The Futurist Hears the Call of War,” 309, 310, 311, 313; The Inventor, 315; Man and the Machine, 315; New York Seen from Brooklyn, 311, 312; War at Austria, 313, 314 Cassatt, Mary, 52, 335 La Castrense (Altar screen dedicated to Our Lady of Light) (Miera y Pacheco), 377, 379 Catastrophe (Lee), 116 Cateforis, David, 252–57 Catlin, George, 41 Cat Looking at Fish (Mirikitani), 217 The Cats of Mirikitani (film), 218 Cats on War News (Tamotzu), 151 Caucus Race (Berdich), 365 Cazin, Charles, 52 Cézanne, Paul, 147, 248, 331, 358 Chagall, Marc, 253 Chandler, Milford G., 392 Changes (Day), 185, 185, 187 Chapman, John Jay, 397 Chapman, Kenneth, 109 Charles Devouring Himself (Caja), 210 Chase, William Merritt, 64, 73, 74, 76 Cheney, Sheldon, 324 Chestnut Street Theatre (Philadelphia), 382–83, 385 The Chicago Imagists, 197

430

64432int.indd 430

Child with Red Face (Sperry), 333, 335 Chinese Restaurant (Wores), 64–65, 66 Circus (Calder), 355 Citizen Kane (Welles), 296–97 “Civilization and Its Discontents” (Freud), 299 Clarinet Player (Keene), 177, 178, 180 Clark, Carol, xvi, 39–43 Clark, Ed, 131 The Closed Shutters (Les volets clos) (Nourse), 54 Coates, Robert, 173 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 97 Cobalt Mountains, Green Sea (Hagedorn), 346 Coburn, Alvin Langdon, 240 Cocteau, Jean, Orphée, 363 Coeyman, Danny, 279 Cohen, Alina, 321 Cole, Thomas, 231 Collage IX: Landscape (Morrison), 367–68, 368, 369, 370 Collier, John, 112 Collins, Anne, 150–56 Colombari, Lucia, 309–15 color field painting, 305 Columbian Society of Artists, 383 Composition (Dow), 240 Concerning the Spiritual in Art (Kandinsky), 321, 331, 344 Cone, Marvin, 258–63; Inner Light, 262; Old Quarry— Stone City, 258–59, 259; Prelude, 260, 261; River Farm, 260; Villages—Southern France No. 1, 260 Congdon, Kristin G., 279 Connelly, Brian, 301–6, 304; Attraction, 303; David Homer, 304; A Night Garden, 301, 302, 305; The Spectrum, 303, 305 Connors, Andrew, 20–25 constructivism, 349, 355 Contemporary Negro Art (exhibition; Baltimore Museum of Art), 159 Contemporary Unknown American Painters (exhibition; Museum of Modern Art), 103 Cooper, James Fenimore, 45, 47, 48 Copley, John Singleton, 14, 27 Cornell, Joseph, 256, 294, 300n6; Bébé Marie, 297 Cotter, Holland, 62, 194 Courbet, Gustave, 193–94 Couture, Thomas, 398 Covarrubias, Miguel, 109 Cover Design for Charles Dudley Warner’s “Being a Boy” (Whitman), 401

INDEX

22-05-31 10:16 AM

Coyote on the Streets (Fonseca), 226–27, 227 Cozzolino, Robert, xix, 367–72 Crawford, Thomas, Progress of Civilization, 5, 7 Crime (Casarini), 311 The Crucifixion (Lebrun), 338, 341 cubism: Belle Baranceanu and, 146; Charles Biederman and, 355; Albert Bloch and, 253; Ernest Blumenschein and, 127; Olinka Hrdy and, 349; Paul F. Keene and, 175, 176 Cubism and Abstract Art (exhibition; Museum of Modern Art), 355 Cubist Self-Portrait, Chicago, January 1932 (Biederman), 356 Cummings, M. Earl, 86 Curry, John Steuart, 259, 260, 261, 262 Curtis, Austin Wingate, Jr., 287 Cushman’s storefront (Loewy), 405, 406 Custer Died for Your Sins (Deloria), 226 Cut-paper Card with The Lord’s Prayer (Honeywell), 386, 387, 388 Daen, Laurel, 388–89 Daingerfield, Elliott, 248 Dama a caballo (Lady on Horseback) (Campeche), 24 Dance (Tooker), 296 Daniel Webster (Goodridge), 37, 37 Daugherty, James, 313 David Homer (Connelly), 304 David N. Dinkins (Neal), 166 Davidson, Morris, 145 Day, Larry, 182–87; After Steen, 183, 184; Changes, 185, 185, 187; Self Portrait Trilogy, 185, 187; Three Worlds, 186, 187 Deas, Charles, xvi, 39–43; The Death Struggle, 39; Walking the Chalk, 40–41, 40, 43; Winnebago (Wa-kon-cha-hi-re-ga) in a Bark Lodge, 41, 42; The Wounded Pawnee, 41, 43, 43 The Death Struggle (Deas), 39 Debussy, Claude, 350 “Decentralization: The Greening of American Art” (Andrews), 202 de Chirico, Giorgio, 164 Deerslayer at the Shooting Match (Walcutt), 47, 48 de Kooning, Willem, xiii–xiv, 183, 300, 331, 335 Deloria, Vine, Jr., 226 Demolishing the Statue of George III in the Bowling Green, New York, July 9, 1776 (Walcutt), 44 Demuth, Charles, 323

Denenberg, Stuart and Beverly, 343 Denis, Maurice, 358 The Departure (Pittman), 292, 292 Der Blaue Reiter, 252 Design (Exposition Park), or A Mysterious Shadow on Five Forms (Hrdy), 352, 353 design: John Joseph Holland, 381–85; Raymond Loewy, 403–7; Miera y Pacheco, 375–80 Design for a Side Chapel in the Gothic Style (Holland), 383 Diaz, Josef, 375–80 Dickinson, Emily, 297 Dijkstra, Bram, 62, 144–49, 341 Diller, Burgoyne, 355 Dinner with Jackson Pollock: Recipes, Art & Nature (Lea), 221–22 The Discovery of Gold in California series (Fonseca), 224–25, 225 Dixon, Maynard, 86, 265, 266 Dobrzynski, Judith H., 250 Dodge, Mabel, 316 Dodo Museum (Beck), 409 Dodos en Suite (Beck), 409, 411 Domínguez, Fray Francisco Atanasio, 377 Dorn, Marion V., 305 Doss, Erika, 256, 316–22 Douglas, Aaron, 159 Douglass, Frederick, 96 Douglass, Lucille, 248 Dove, Arthur, 324, 328 Dow, Arthur Wesley, 239–44, 316; Composition (book), 240; The Mirror, 241, 242; Rain in May, 241–42, 243; Silhouetted Trees, 240, 241 drag art, Jerome Caja, 210 Dragonflycanique (Beck), 411, 412 Drake, Dave, 97 Driskell, David, 78, 81, 166 Du Bois, W. E. B., 81 Duchamp, Marcel, 103 Dunkley, Tina, 137 Dunn, Dorothy, 108–9, 113 Duveneck, Frank, 64 The Eagle Dance at Taos (Hamlin), 266, 268 Eagles, Thomas, 14, 15 Eddy, Mary Baker, 335 Edwin, David, 385 El Greco, 134, 147

INDEX

64432int.indd 431

431

22-05-31 10:16 AM

Elizabeth Nourse, 1859–1938: A Salon Career (exhibition; National Museum of American Art/Cincinnati Art Museum), 52 Eliza Greatorex (Boyle), 234 Ellet, Elizabeth, 236 Emerson, Ellen Louisa Tucker, 35 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 35 Engle, Paul, 260 Erster Deutscher Herbstsalon (exhibition; Berlin), 252 Escalante, Vélez de, 377 Esther (Adams), 397 Ethiopia Awakening (Fuller), 80, 81 Evening Sounds (Torr), 327 Evergood, Philip, 120–24, 150; My Forebears Were Pioneers, 120, 121, 122; Through the Mill, 123–24, 123 Evers, John, John Joseph Holland, 382–83, 384 The Evolution of African American Art 1800–1950 (exhibition), 165 existentialism, 364 expressionism: Belle Baranceanu, 149; Belle Baranceanu and, 146; Albert Bloch and, 253; Paul F. Keene, 180 Fahlman, Betsy, 264–68 False Image (exhibition; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago), 196 The Family (Alston), 172, 173 fauvism, 253 Feininger, Lionel, 344 Feke, Robert, 26 Felski, Rita, 218 female artists, marginalization of: abstract expressionism and, 335; abstraction and, 307; art canon and, 81; early twentieth century, 76, 77; exhibitions highlighting, 264; medium and, 33, 362; modernism and, 328, 353; nineteenth century, 114, 397; representational art and, 300n10; research on, 1, 3. See also specific artists and works female patrons/collectors, 3–4 feminism: Christina Ramberg and, 195–98; May Stevens and, 190, 191, 192–94 Fiedler, Konrad, 358 Fine, Ruth, 182–87 Fiorentino, Rosso, 187 The First Communion (La première communion) (Nourse), 52, 53, 54 First Papers of Surrealism (exhibition; Coordinating Council of French Relief Societies, New York), 103

432

64432int.indd 432

Fishko, Debbie, 204, 206 Fitzpatrick, John Kelly, 245 Five Contemporary Concretionists: Biederman, Calder, Ferren, Morris, Shaw (exhibition, Paul Reinhardt Galleries, New York), 355 Flemister, Frederick C., 131–37; Man with a Brush, 134, 135; The Mourners, 134, 136; Self-Portrait, 131, 132, 133, 137 The Flying Dutchman (Wagner), 363 folk art: Morris Hirshfield and, 107; Doris Emrick Lee, 117 Fonseca, Harry, 224–29; American Dream Machine, 228, 229; Coyote on the Streets, 226–27, 227; The Discovery of Gold in California series, 224–25, 225 Force, Juliana, 152 Ford, William, 142 Forever Free (Lewis), 4–5, 6 forgetting: as condition of seeing, 4–5, 7; as ignorance, 3, 9, 10n5. See also obscurity Fort, Ilene Susan, 361–66 Francis Williams, the Scholar of Jamaica (unknown artist), 15, 16 Frankenstein, Alfred, 346 Franklin, Benjamin, 27 French, Daniel Chester, 87 French Barbizon School, 240, 398 Freud, Sigmund, 299 Fristrom, Edvard, xxi From Everett Street, Los Angeles (Baranceanu), 147 From My Window (Hayakawa), 141 Fuller, Meta Warrick, 78–83, 79; Ethiopia Awakening, 80, 81; The Wretched, 82 futurism, 309–15 “The Futurist Hears the Call of War” (Casarini), 309, 310, 311 Galerie Huit (Paris), 176 Galt, John, 14 Garnet, Henry Highland, 5 Gaylor, Wood, xiii; Rites of Spring, xiv Genauer, Emily, 173 gender. See female artists, marginalization of Generations (Keene), 179, 180 Genesis (Lebrun), 340, 341 Geometric (Torr), 325 geometric abstraction, 353 German expressionism, 344 German Town (Baranceanu), 149

INDEX

22-05-31 10:16 AM

Gestetner, Siegfried, 404 Giacometti, Alberto, 355 Gibbons, Sallie, 236 GI Bill, 176, 183, 189, 225 Gibson, Ann, 368 Gifford, Charles Henry, xviii Gifford, Robert Swain, xvi–xvii; Near the Coast, xviii Gifford, Sanford R., xviii Gilcrease, Thomas, 127 Giles, Howard, 353 Glackens, William, 74 Goff, Bruce, 349, 350, 351 Goldthwaite, Anne, 248 Golub, Leon, 365 Goodridge, Eliza, 35 Goodridge, Sarah, 33–38; Beauty Revealed, 33–34, 34, 37–38; Daniel Webster, 37, 37; Self-Portrait, 35, 36 Gothic, 290, 293, 296, 300 Gould, Glenn, 358 Goya, Francisco, Saturn Devouring His Son, 210 The Grand Canyon (Hamlin), 266, 267 Grandfather’s Birthday (La fête de grand-père) (Nourse), 54 Grauman’s Chinese Theater (Lee), 117, 117 Greatorex, Eliza, 233–38; Old New York: From the Battery to Bloomingdale, 235, 236; St. Paul’s Church, 237; The Pond at Cernay La Ville, 235, 235 Greenberg, Clement, 103, 106, 173, 337 Greene, Carroll, Jr., 165 Green Mountains, Pale Lightning (Hagedorn), 345 Greenwood, John, 26–32; Jersey Nanny, 26, 27, 28; Portrait of a Naval Officer with a Coastal Map and Binoculars in Hand, 30, 31; Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam, 26 Griffin, Randall C., 125–30 Guerrilla Girls, 194 Guggenheim, Peggy, 4, 9, 103 Guston, Philip, 183, 300 Haerer, Carol, xxi Hagedorn, Edward, 343–48; Cobalt Mountains, Green Sea, 346; Green Mountains, Pale Lightning, 345; The Rainbow, 347 Haidt, John Valentine, xxi Hall, William, 15 Halstead, Whitney, 363 Hambidge, Jay, 353 Hamlin, Edith, 264–68; Canyon of Flame and Storm, 264; The Eagle Dance at Taos, 266, 268; The Grand

Canyon, 266, 267; Maynard Dixon, Painter of the Desert, 265, 266 Hammond, Harmony, 192 Happy Clouds, Happy Trees: The Bob Ross Phenomenon (Congdon, Blandy, and Coeyman), 276, 278, 279 Harlem Renaissance: Art of Black America (Campbell), 81 Harlem Renaissance, 81 Harnett, William, 281 Harrington, Joseph, 64 Hartley, Marsden, 73, 253, 316, 358 Harvey, Melanee C., 202–8 Haskell, Barbara, 323–29 Hassam, Childe, 54 Hattendorf, Linda, 218 Hauptman, Jodi, 297 Hayakawa, Miki, 138–43, 156n12; From My Window, 141; Music, 140, 140; One Afternoon, 138–39, 139, 141, 143; Portrait of a Negro, 141; Untitled (Woman with Blue Hair), 142–43, 142; Worker, 139–40 Hayter, Stanley William, 122, 362 Heartney, Eleanor, xv–xvi He Is Risen! (attr. Pell), 59 Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, xix Henri, Robert, 73, 311, 331 Hereditary Uncertainty (Ramberg), 200 Heresies, 192 Hermetic Indecision (Ramberg), 200 Hess, Elizabeth, 192 Hidden Heritage (Driskell), 81 Hildebrand, Adolf, 358 Hill, Carrie Lillian, 245–51, 246; The Hillside, 249; In the Foothills of the Pyrenees, 245, 247; Old Mill at Mountain Brook, 249, 250; View of Segovia, 250 Hills, Patricia, 188–94 The Hillside (Hill), 249 Hirshfield, Morris, 102–7; Angora Cat, 103, 103; Nude at the Window (Hot Night in July), 103, 104 Hirshler, Erica, xiv, 397–402 The History and Progress of the Navajo Nation (Nailor), 111–13, 112 The History of the Negro in California—Exploration and Colonization (Alston), 169, 170 The History of the Negro in California—Settlement and Development (Woodruff ), 169 Hofmann, Hans, 330–31, 332 Hokusai, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, 240 Holland, John Joseph, 381–85, 384; Design for a Side Chapel in the Gothic Style, 383

INDEX

64432int.indd 433

433

22-05-31 10:16 AM

Honeywell, Martha Ann, 386–90; Cut-paper Card with The Lord’s Prayer, 386, 387, 388 Hoover, John, 41 Hopkins, Emma Curtis, 318 Hopper, Edward, 163, 293; Hotel Lobby, 272 Hotel Lobby (Hopper), 272 Houser, Allan, 109 Hrdy, Olinka, 349–53; Cartoon for the Tulsa Convention Hall Curtain, 351; Design (Exposition Park), or A Mysterious Shadow on Five Forms, 352, 353; Modern American Music, 350–51; Studies for Tulsa Riverside Studio Murals, 350; Symphony of the Arts (Painting, Architecture, Music, and Dance), 350; Weaving, 351 Hudson River School, 231, 235 The Hull (Bloom), xv Humbert, Jacques-Fernand, 58 Hunt, William Morris, 397, 398 Hutchinson, Elizabeth, 108–13 Hyman Bloom: Matters of Life and Death (exhibition; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), xiv–xvi

434

64432int.indd 434

Janis, Sidney, 102–3, 107n6 Janitors at Rest (Andrews), 203 Jawlensky, Alexei, 344 Jersey Nanny (Greenwood), 26, 27, 28 Joachim, Harold, 362 “Joel Wetsel the Indian Hunter” (Walcutt), 45, 47 John Joseph Holland (Evers), 382–83, 384 Johnson, William H., 165 Johnston, Frances Benjamin, 94 Johnston, Thomas, 27 Jones, Lois Mailou, 159 The Journal of Llewellin Penrose, a Seaman (Williams), 15 Journal of Negro History, 176 The Joy of Painting, 275, 277–78 Junker, Patricia, 343–48 Jury for Trial of a Sheepherder for Murder (Blumenschein), 127, 128, 129

Illumination: The Paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, Agnes Pelton, Agnes Martin, and Florence Miller Pierce (exhibition; Orange County Museum of Art), 318 illustration from Parke Godwin, Vala: A Mythological Tale (Walcutt), 46 illustrations for Tyner’s Through the Invisible: A Love Story (Pell), 58 impressionism: Carrie Lillian Hill, 245–51; landscape and, 231; Elizabeth Nourse and, 54; Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones and, 75; Theodore Wores and, 67 Independent Spirits: Women Painters of the American West, 1890–1945 (exhibition; Brigham Young University Museum of Art), 264 Indiana, Robert, 365 Ingham, Vicki Leigh, 250 Inner Light (Cone), 262 In Rittenhouse Square (Sparhawk-Jones), 74–75, 75 Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), 225–26 In the Attic (Roberts), 296–97, 296, 300n6 In the Foothills of the Pyrenees (Hill), 245, 247 In the Spring (Sparhawk-Jones), 74 The Inventor (Casarini), 315 The Iris Flowers of Hori Kiri, Tokio (Wores), 67 ironic realism, 183, 187

Kandinsky, Wassily, 252, 255, 321, 331, 344 Kaneko, Maki, 216–23 Karlstrom, Paul, xxi, 209–15 Käsebier, Gertrude, 240, 316 Kates, Louise, 155 Katz, Wendy, 44–49 Keene, Paul F., Jr., 175–81; Clarinet Player, 177, 178, 180; Generations, 179, 180; Street Quartet, 178, 180 Kemeys, Edward, 86 Kent, Rockwell, 116 Kepner, Jim, 287 King-Hammond, Leslie, 81 Kirstein, Lincoln, 299 The Kiss (La baiser) (Nourse), 54 Klee, Paul, 252, 344 Kline, Franz, 331, 335 Knight, Christopher, 318, 341 Knight, Hilary, 305 Know-Nothing movement, 45, 47–48 Koch, John, 305 Koehler, S. R ., xvii Kornhauser, Elizabeth, 33–38 Kozloff, Joyce, 192 Kramer, Hilton, xviii–xix Kristeva, Julia, 194 Kuniyoshi, Yasuo, 150, 154 Kuykendall, Lara, 270–74

Jackson, May Howard, 81 Jackson, Shirley, 300

La Farge, John, 397, 401 LaFountain, Jason, 275–80

INDEX

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Lahey, Richard, 145 La Natividad (Campeche), 22, 23 Lane, Fitz Henry, xvi–xvii; The Western Shore with Norman’s Woe, xvii Langley, Bernique, 141–42 Lanyon, Ellen, 365 Larkin, Oliver, 120, 122 The Last Hand Job (Caja), 212 Latrobe, Benjamin, 385 Laurens, Jean-Paul, 58 Lawrence, Jacob, 159, 173 Lawson, Ernest, 250 Lay, Benjamin, 15, 17 Lea, Robyn, 221–22 Leaf Bud (Baranceanu), 145, 146 Lebrun, Rico, 337–42; Buchenwald Cart, 341; Buchenwald Pit, 341; The Crucifixion, 338, 341; Genesis, 340, 341; Sleeping Soldier, 338; Vertical Composition, 338, 339 Le Corbusier, 349 Lee, Anthony W., 90–95 Lee, Doris Emrick, 114–19; Catastrophe, 116; Grauman’s Chinese Theater, 117, 117; Oranges and Avocados, 118, 118; Thanksgiving, 115–16, 116 Lee (Baranceanu), 148, 149 Lee-Smith, Hughie, 162–67; Boy on the Rooftop, 165; Boy with Tire, 163; The Bridge, 164–65, 165; Man with Balloons, 163, 164; Self-Portrait, 164 Léger, Fernand, 355 The Lei Maker (Wores), 67, 68 Leslie, Charles Robert, 385 Letters to a Young Poet (Rilke), 331 Levin, Harry, 299 Levine, Jack, 122 Lewis, Mary Edmonia, 78, 81; Forever Free, 4–5, 6 Lewis, Norman, 159 Lewis, Samella, 78, 162 Lhote, André, 116 Life and Studies of Benjamin West, Esq. (West and Galt), 14 Life Mask (Abraham Lincoln) (Roberts), 297 Light House (White Cloud) (Torr), 326 Lippard, Lucy, 192, 194, 203 Lobel, Michael, 157–61 Locke, Alain, 78, 133, 159 Loewy, Raymond, 403–7; Cushman’s storefront, 405, 406; Exxon logo, 407; Foley’s Department Store design, 405–6; S-1 locomotive, 405, 406–7

The Long Rows (Andrews), 203 L’Opéra (Beck), 409 Los Angeles Hills (Baranceanu), 147, 147, 149 Lovell, Margaretta Markle, 26–32 “lover’s eye” miniatures, 37–38 Lubin, David M., 330–36 Lynch, David, 293 magic realism: Brian Connelly, 301–6; Priscilla Roberts, 294–300 Maid Servant Pouring Milk (Vermeer), 297 Man and the Machine (Casarini), 315 Manet, Édouard, 76 Mann, Thomas, 187 mannerism, 187 Manthorne, Katherine, 233–38 Man with a Brush (Flemister), 134, 135 Man with Balloons (Lee-Smith), 163, 164 Mapa de la parte interna de la Nuevo México (Miera y Pacheco), 376, 377 Marc, Franz, 252, 255 marginalization. See obscurity Marín del Valle, Francisco Antonio, 376, 377 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 311 The Market (Sparhawk-Jones), 74, 74 Marley, Anna, 73–77 Marsh, Reginald, 90–95, 134 Martin, Agnes, 321 Martinez, Xavier, 86 Martínez de Ugarte, María Ignacia, 377 The Martinsville Seven (Stevens), 189 The Masked Ball (Berdich), 363 Mathews, Arthur, 67 Matisse, Henri, 248, 331, 332 Maurer, Alfred, 253 Maynard Dixon, Painter of the Desert (Hamlin), 265, 266 May Stevens (Block), 193 May Stevens (Hills), 189 Mazeppa américain (Millet), 44 McBride, Henry, 316, 321, 355 McCausland, Elizabeth, 120, 152 McCrossen, Preston, 141 McDonnell, Patricia, 354–60 McLeary, Kindred, xxi Meigs, Montgomery, 5 Melville, Herman, 299, 300n6 Mendelsohn, Erich, 349 Mengs, Anton Raphael, 21

INDEX

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435

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Merish, Lori, 3–4 Merriman, Helen, 398 Meyer, Richard, 102–7 Miera y Pacheco, Bernardo, 375–80; La Castrense (Altar screen dedicated to Our Lady of Light), 377, 379; Mapa de la parte interna de la Nuevo México, 376, 377; San Raphael Archangel, 377, 378 Mignot, Louis Rémy, 233 Miller, Angela, 294–300 Miller, Arthur, xiii Millet, Jean-François, 44 miniaturists, 33–38 Mirikitani, Jimmy Tsutomu, 216–23; Cat Looking at Fish, 217; Untitled (Grapes for Pollock), 218, 220, 221–22 Miró, Joan, 355 The Mirror (Dow), 241, 242 Miss Pat and Miss Eva Lyon (Pittman), 290, 290 Mitchell, W. J. T., 279 mixed media, 408–13 Moby-Dick (Melville), 299 Modern American Music (Hrdy), 350–51 Modern American Painting 1900–1940: Toward a New Perspective (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), xix modernism: Belle Baranceanu, 149; Charles Biederman, 354–60; Albert Bloch, 252–53; Ernest Blumenschein and, 126; Brian Connelly and, 305; Larry Day, 183; Arthur Wesley Dow and, 240, 242, 244; Doris Emrick Lee and, 115; Putnam and, 87; Constance Coleman Richardson, 270–74; Helen Torr, 323–29. See also abstraction Modern Negro Art (Porter), 78 Moholy-Nagy, László, 353 Mondrian, Piet, 103, 355 Monet, Claude, 358 Montebello, Philippe de, 22 Mooney, Amy, 133 Moore, Mary, 358 Morang, Alfred, 141 Morris, George L. K., 355 Morrison, George, 367–72; Collage IX: Landscape, 367–68, 368, 369, 370; Untitled (1960), 370, 370; Untitled (1973), 371 Moses, “Grandma” (Anna Mary Robertson), 103 Mothcanique (Beck), 411 A Mother (Une mère) (Nourse), 50, 51 Mother of Silence (Pelton), 318, 319 Moulin, Gabriel, Arthur Putnam (sketching in his notebook), 85

436

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Mountain Stream (Ross), 277 The Mourners (Flemister), 134, 136 Movie Palace (Beck), 509, 510 murals: Charles Alston, 169, 170; Belle Baranceanu, 149; Edith Hamlin, 265–67, 267, 268; Olinka Hrdy, 350, 350, 351, 353; Rico Lebrun, 338, 340, 341; Doris Emrick Lee, 116; Gerald Nailor, 109, 111–13, 112; Robert Neal, 159; Hale Aspacio Woodruff, 169 Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban, 22 Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) (Boston), xiv–xvi Music (Hayakawa), 140, 140 MVSEVM (Beck), 409, 411 My Forebears Were Pioneers (Evergood), 120, 121, 122 Mysteries and Politics (Stevens), 188, 193 My Thing (Neal), 159 Nailor, Gerald (Toy Yah), 108–13; Navajo Woman and Colt, 109, 110; The History and Progress of the Navajo Nation, 111–13, 112; Untitled, 109, 111 National Academy of Design, 164, 235 National Museum of African American History and Culture, 131 National Museum of Women in the Arts, 271 Native American artists. See artists of color, marginalization of; specific artists and works nativism, 45, 47–48 Navajo Woman and Colt (Nailor), 109, 110 Neal, Robert, 133, 157–61; David N. Dinkins, 166; My Thing, 159; The Petrified Forest, 157–58, 158, 159; Rearguard, 159–60, 160; Reginald F. Lewis, 166; Three Trees, 159 Near the Coast (Gifford, R. S.), xviii Negro Art: Past and Present (Locke), 78 Nemerov, Alexander, 386–90 neoclassicism, 187 New Age, New Age: Strategies for Survival (exhibition; DePaul Art Museum), 276 Newman, Barnett, 305 New Thought, 318 New York Seen from Brooklyn (Casarini), 311, 312 A Night Garden (Connelly), 301, 302, 305 Nochlin, Linda, 183 Noda, Hideo Benjamin, 150 Nolde, Emile, 344 Nourse, Elizabeth, 50–56; The Closed Shutters (Les volets clos), 54; The First Communion (La première communion), 52, 53, 54; Grandfather’s Birthday (La fête de grand-père), 54; The Kiss (La baiser), 54; A

INDEX

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Mother (Une mère), 50, 51; The Open Window (La fênetre ouverte), 54; Returning from Church, Penmarc’h (Rentrant de l’église, Penmarc’h), 54; Summer Hours (Les heures d’été), 54, 55 Novak, Barbara, xvii, 233 Nude at the Window (Hot Night in July) (Hirshfield), 103, 104 Nygard, Travis, 283–88 obscurity: class and, 203; design and, 385; folk artists, 107; gender and, 1, 3, 114, 264, 300n10, 307, 328, 335, 353, 362, 397; geography and, 84, 125, 253, 264, 307, 337; Jewish artists and, 106; medium and, 33, 84, 362; Native American art collecting and, 395–96; race and, 1, 3, 96–97, 152, 155, 159, 166; religion and, 321; representational art and, 300n10, 302; sexuality and, 209; stylistic variety and, 168–69, 173. See also female artists, marginalization of O’Grady, Megan, 9 O’Keeffe, Georgia, 146, 239–40, 321, 324 Old Mill at Mountain Brook (Hill), 249, 250 Old New York: From the Battery to Bloomingdale (Greatorex), 235, 236 Old Quarry—Stone City (Cone), 258–59, 259 One Afternoon (Hayakawa), 138–39, 139, 141, 143 On the Right (Andrews), 205, 206–7 The Open Window (La fênetre ouverte) (Nourse), 54 Oranges and Avocados (Lee), 118, 118 Orbits (Pelton), 318, 320 “Ordinary/Extraordinary” (Stevens), 192 The Ornithologist (Richardson), 273, 273 Orozco, José Clemente, Prometheus, 341 Orphée (Cocteau), 363 Ortiz, Simon, 224 Oubre, Hayward, 133, 134 “outhouse school,” 134, 137n6 “Painterman”, Davy T. (Davy Turner), The Bald Eagle Mountain, 279 Painting (Alston), 169, 171, 173 The Paintings of Morris Hirshfield (exhibition; Museum of Modern Art), 103, 105, 106 Paley, Grace, 189 Pan-Africanism, 81 Paret y Alcázar, Luis, 21 Passing Train (Bloch), 255–56, 256 Peace and Honor (Whitman), 400 Peake, Channing, 338

Peale, Charles Willson, 385 Pelham, Peter, 27 Pell, Ella Ferris, 57–63, 61; Adam, 58; Agnes Dei, 61; Andromeda, 58; The Angel Making Adam See the Consequences of His Sin, 58; family history, 62n; He Is Risen! (attr.), 59; illustrations for Tyner’s Through the Invisible: A Love Story, 58; Salomé, 58, 60, 61, 62, 62–63n6 Pelton, Agnes, 256, 316–22; Ahme in Egypt, 321; Being, 317, 318; Mother of Silence, 318, 319; Orbits, 318, 320; Sea Change, 321; Stone Age, 316; Vine Wood, 316 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), 73–74 Perry, Lilla Cabot, 73 Peters, DeWitt, 176 Pether, William, 27 Peto, John Frederick, 281 The Petrified Forest (Neal), 157–58, 158, 159 Pevsner, Antoine, 355 photography, 90–95 Piazzoni, Gottardo, 86 Picasso, Pablo, 103, 123, 248 pictorialism, 240 Pindell, Howardena, 1, 3; Art Crow/Jim Crow, 1, 2, 7; Autobiography: Water (Ancestors/Middle Passage/ Family Ghosts), 7, 8, 9 Pinder, Kymberly, 134 Pippin, Horace, 73 Pittman, Hobson, 289–93; The Departure, 292, 292; Miss Pat and Miss Eva Lyon, 290, 290; The Widow, 290–91 Pleissner, Ogden, 274 Poe, Edgar Allan, 290, 300n6 Poissoncardré (Beck), 411 Pollock, Jackson, xiii–xiv, 4, 218, 220, 221–22; Search, 331 Pollock, 4 The Pond at Cernay La Ville (Greatorex), 235, 235 Porter, Austin, 168–74 Porter, Bruce, 86 Porter, James A., 78, 133 Porter, Rufus, 278 Portrait of a Collagist (Andrews), 204 Portrait of a Naval Officer with a Coastal Map and Binoculars in Hand (Greenwood), 30, 31 Portrait of a Negro (Hayakawa), 141 post-impressionism, 253 postmodernism, 202, 203 Postmortem Photograph of an Infant Held by Two Women and a Girl (Sutermeister), 90, 91, 92 Powell, Richard, 81, 133

INDEX

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Prelude (Cone), 260, 261 Prentice, Rose, 35 printmaking, 361–66 prison art programs, 206, 207 Probed Cinch (Ramberg), 200 Proctor, Robert N., 3 Progress of Civilization (Crawford), 5, 7 Prometheus (Orozco), 341 Ptaszynski, William, 341 Puma on Guard (Putnam), 88, 88 Putnam, Arthur, 84–89, 85; Bacchus, 87; Puma on Guard, 88, 88; Snarling Jaguar, 87 Quinn, John, 316 Rain, Charles, 296–97, 305 The Rainbow (Hagedorn), 347 Rain in May (Dow), 241–42, 243 Ramberg, Christina, 195–201; Black Widow, 197, 198, 200; Hereditary Uncertainty, 200; Hermetic Indecision, 200; Probed Cinch, 200; Schizophrenic Discovery, 199, 200; Shady Lacy, 200; Untitled, 196, 197 Randolph, Lee, 346 Rapp, Linda, 287 Rather, Susan, 13–19 Rauschenberg, Robert, 363 The Raven (Poe), 300n6 Realism Now (exhibition; Loeb Art Center, Vassar College), 183 The Realist Revival (exhibition; American Federation of Arts), 183 Rearguard (Neal), 159–60, 160 Rebay, Hilda, 336n6 Reginald F. Lewis (Neal), 166 regionalism: Marvin Cone, 258–63; landscape and, 231; Doris Emrick Lee, 116 Returning from Church, Penmarc’h (Rentrant de l’église, Penmarc’h) (Nourse), 54 Revolt against the City (Wood), 260, 261 Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance (exhibition), 81 Ribera, Jusepe de, 22 Rich, Daniel Catton, 144 Richardson, Constance Coleman, 270–74; The Ornithologist, 273, 273; Streetlight, 270–72, 271, 273 Richardson, Edgar P. “Ted,” 272 Richmond-Moll, Jeffrey, 301–6

438

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Rilke, Rainer Maria, 331 Rimmer, William, 58 Rites of Spring (Gaylor), xiv Rivera, Diego, 84, 109, 341 River Farm (Cone), 260 Riverview Section, Chicago (Baranceanu), 146 Roberts, Priscilla, 294–300; The Attic Scene, 294, 295; In the Attic, 296–97, 296, 300n6; Life Mask (Abraham Lincoln), 297; Self-Portrait, 298 Robertson, Anna Mary (“Grandma” Moses), 103 Robertson, Bruce, xviii, xix Robeson, Paul, 159 Robinson, Edward G., 117 Robinson, Jontyle Theresa, 62 Rocca, Suellen, 365 Rodin, Auguste, 52, 81–82, 84 Roerich, Helena, 318 Roller Skating (Sparhawk-Jones), 73–74 romanticism, Larry Day and, 187 Rosehill, Lord (David Carnegie), 15 Rosenthal, Nan, 183, 187 Rosenwald, Robert, 176 Roses—Souvenir de Villier le bel (Whitman), 398, 399 Ross, Bob, 275–80, 276; Mountain Stream, 277 Rothko, Mark, 256, 305, 331, 332 Rousseau, Henri, 107 Rudhyar, Dane, 318 Rush, William, 385 Ruskin, John, 52, 303 Ryan, Anne, 362 S-1 locomotive (Loewy), 405, 406–7 Saint-Gaudens, Homer, 316 Saint-Pierre, Gaston Casimir, 58 Salomé (Pell), 58, 60, 61, 62, 62–63n6 Salon (Paris), 9, 52, 58 Sanger, Margaret, 291–92 San Raphael Archangel (Miera y Pacheco), 377, 378 Santa Fe art community, 141–42, 155, 156n12, 227 Santayana, George, 398, 402 santero tradition, 375, 377 Sargent, John Singer, 50, 54, 84 Saturn Devouring His Son (Goya), 210 Savage, Augusta, 81 scene painting, 381–85 Scenic View of the Village (Baranceanu), 149 Scheyer, Galka, 344 Schizophrenic Discovery (Ramberg), 199, 200

INDEX

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Schmid, Rupert, 86 Scholder, Fritz, 225–26 Schönberg, Arnold, 350 Schor, Mira, 248 Schweik, Susan, 390n3 Scott, Amy, 224–29 sculpture: Ruth Asawa, xix, xx, xxi; Thomas Crawford, 5, 7; Meta Warrick Fuller, 78–83; Mary Edmonia Lewis, 4–5, 6; Arthur Putnam, 84–89 Sea Captains Carousing in Surinam (Greenwood), 26, 27, 29, 29, 31 Sea Change (Pelton), 321 Search (Pollock), 331 Search for the Real (Hofmann), 331 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 218 Self-Portrait (Flemister), 131, 132, 133, 137 Self-Portrait (Goodridge), 35, 36 Self-Portrait (Lee-Smith), 164 Self-Portrait (Roberts), 298 Seligman, Kurt, 362 Selz, Peter, 341 Sexton, Charles, 212 Shady Lacy (Ramberg), 200 Shahn, Ben, 122 Shaw, Charles, 355 Sheeler, Charles, 73, 316 Sherald, Amy, 131 Shields, Scott A., 64–69 Shoe Shop (Sparhawk-Jones), 74 Shop Girls (Sparhawk-Jones), 74, 75–76, 76 Shriner, Patti Adams, 349, 350 Silhouetted Trees (Dow), 240, 241 Simon Kenton’s Ride (Walcutt), 45 Simpson, Merton D., 165 Siqueiros, David Alfaro, 341 Sleeping Soldier (Lebrun), 338 Slinkard, Rex, xxi Sloan, John, 141, 150, 155 Sloan, Marianna, 73 Smibert, John, 26 Smith, Nathaniel, 19 Smith, Pamela Colman, 316 Smith, Roberta, xiii, xix Smith, Thomas Brent, 84–89 Snarling Jaguar (Putnam), 87 social realism: Philip Evergood and, 122, 124; Chuzo Tamotzu, 151 Société Nationale des Artistes Français, 52

Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts, 52, 82–83 Society of Independent Artists, 150 SoHo Women Artists (Stevens), 193 Sonderbund (exhibition; Cologne, 1912), 252 Southern Gothic, 290 Southern Pasture (Andrews), 203 Soyer, Raphael, 202 Sparhawk-Jones, Elizabeth, 73–77; In Rittenhouse Square, 74–75, 75; In the Spring, 74; The Market, 74, 74; Roller Skating, 73–74; Shoe Shop, 74; Shop Girls, 74, 75–76, 76; The Veil Counter, 74 The Spectrum (Connelly), 303, 305 Sperry, Vicci, 330–36; The Art Experience (book), 331–32, 335; Brief Encounter in the Orange Grove, 332; Child with Red Face, 333, 335; Springtime Emergence, 334 Spinners (Velázquez), 76 Spiral (artist organization), 173 The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting 1890–1985 (exhibition; Los Angeles County Museum of Art), 318 spiritual modernism: Albert Bloch, 252–57; Agnes Pelton, 316–22; Vicci Sperry and, 335 Spreckels, Alma de Bretteville, 88 Springtime Emergence (Sperry), 334 Stackpole, Ralph, 86 stained glass, 398, 400, 401 Stella, Joseph, 313 Stendhal, 332 Stetson, Charles Walter, xxi Stevens, May, 188–94; The Artist’s Studio (After Courbet), 192, 193; The Martinsville Seven, 189; Mysteries and Politics, 188, 193; “Ordinary/ Extraordinary,” 192; SoHo Women Artists, 193; Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg, 190, 192–93; Two Women, 191, 192–93 Stewart, Jeffrey, 133 Stieglitz, Alfred, 323, 324, 328 still lifes: George Washington Carver, 283–88; Priscilla Roberts, 294–300 Still Life with Newspaper (Tamotzu), 151, 151 Stoddard, Alice Kent, 73 Stone, Allan, 413 Stone, Olympia, 413 Stone Age (Pelton), 316 Stone City, Iowa (Wood), 259 Stone City Colony and Art School, 259 Storey, Frederick, 87 St. Paul’s Church (Greatorex), 237 Stravinsky, Igor, 350

INDEX

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439

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Streetlight (Richardson), 270–72, 271, 273 Street Quartet (Keene), 178, 180 Strickland, William, 385 Stuart, Gilbert, 14, 35, 76, 129 Stuart, Jane, 35 Studies for Tulsa Riverside Studio Murals (Hrdy), 350 Studio (Andrews), 204 Sully, Thomas, 385 Summer Hours (Les heures d’été) (Nourse), 54, 55 Summer Relief (Tamotzu), 152, 153 Superstition (Blumenschein), 126–27, 126, 129 surrealism: Vera Berdich and, 363, 364; Charles Biederman and, 355; Hirshfield and, 103, 107; Doris Emrick Lee and, 116 Sutermeister, Margaret, 90–95; Asian Laundryman, 92, 93; Postmortem Photograph of an Infant Held by Two Women and a Girl, 90, 91, 92 Suydam, James Augustus, 233 symbolic realism, 297, 299 symbolist movement: Vera Berdich and, 363; Ernest Blumenschein and, 127; Meta Warrick Fuller and, 78, 83; Agnes Pelton and, 316; Priscilla Roberts, 297, 299 Symbols (Andrews), 203–4 Symphony of the Arts (Painting, Architecture, Music, and Dance) (Hrdy), 350 Tamotzu, Chuzo, 150–56; Beware of Militarism, 152, 154, 154; Carving the Map of China, 151–52; Cats on War News, 151; Still Life with Newspaper, 151, 151; Summer Relief, 152, 153 Tanner, Henry Ossawa, 164 Taos Society of Artists, 125 Tapia y Rivera, Alejandro, 25 Teaching in Prison (Andrews), 204 Tesson, Joseph, Jr., 392 Thanksgiving (Lee), 115–16, 116 theater design, 381–85 Theosophy, 318 Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji (Hokusai), 240 This Is Not a Pipe Organ (Beck), 408 3 Generations of African American Women Sculptors: A Study in Paradox (exhibition; Afro-American Historical and Cultural Museum, Philadelphia), 81 306 (artist organization), 173 Three Trees (Neal), 159 Three Worlds (Day), 186, 187 Through the Mill (Evergood), 123–24, 123 The Thrust (Andrews), 206, 207

440

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Tiffany, Louis Comfort, xvii Till, Emmett, 137 Tisdale, Elkanah, 34 Tobey, Mark, 256 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 389 Tooker, George, 164, 305; Dance, 296 Torr, Helen, 323–29; Evening Sounds, 327; Geometric, 325; Light House (White Cloud), 326 Torrence, Gaylord, 391–96 Toy Yah. See Nailor, Gerald Traylor, Bill, 96–101; Between Worlds: The Art of Bill Traylor (exhibition), 97, 99, 101; Bill Traylor, Untitled (Seated Woman), 100; Untitled (Legs Construction with Blue Man), 98; Untitled (Red Goat with Snake), 99; Untitled (Seated Woman), 100 Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg (Stevens), 190, 192–93 Twachtman, John, 64 #24 Constable (Biederman), 359 Two Centuries of Black American Art (Driskell), 78 Two Centuries of Black American Art (exhibition; Los Angeles County Museum of Art), 78, 166 Two Women (Stevens), 191, 192–93 Tyner, Paul, 58 Umberger, Leslie, 96–101 Untitled, New York, June 1936 (Biederman), 357 Untitled (1960) (Morrison), 370, 370 Untitled (1973) (Morrison), 371 Untitled (Grapes for Pollock) (Mirikitani), 218, 220, 221–22 Untitled (Legs Construction with Blue Man) (Traylor), 98 Untitled (Nailor), 109, 111 Untitled (Ramberg), 196, 197 Untitled (Red Goat with Snake) (Traylor), 99 Untitled (S.108 Hanging, Six-Lobed, Multi-Layered Continuous Form Within a Form) (Asawa), xx Untitled (Seated Woman) (Traylor), 100 Untitled (Woman with Blue Hair) (Hayakawa), 142–43, 142 Uytewael, Joachim, 187 van der Marck, Jan, 354, 360 van der Meulen, Anna, 209, 212 vanitas, 296 Van Vechten, Carl, 305 Vanzi, Pio, 86 The Veil Counter (Sparhawk-Jones), 74 Velázquez, Diego, Spinners, 76

INDEX

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Venus in Cleveland (Caja), 214, 215 Vermeer, Johannes, Maid Servant Pouring Milk, 297 Vertical Composition (Lebrun), 338, 339 View of Segovia (Hill), 250 Villages—Southern France No. 1 (Cone), 260 Vine Wood (Pelton), 316 Virginia (Baranceanu), 146 Wabash Avenue Bridge (Baranceanu), 149 Wagner, Richard, The Flying Dutchman, 363 Walcutt, William, 44–49; Deerslayer at the Shooting Match, 47, 48; Demolishing the Statue of George III in the Bowling Green, New York, July 9, 1776, 44; illustration from Parke Godwin, Vala: A Mythological Tale, 46; Simon Kenton’s Ride, 45 Walden, Herwarth, 252 Walker, Hudson, 102 Walking the Chalk (Deas), 40–41, 40, 43 Wallace, Ettilie, 146 Wallach, Alan, 120–24 Wanamaker’s Department Store, 74, 75 Wang, ShiPu, 138–43 War at Austria (Casarini), 313, 314 Ward, Charles Caleb, xvi, xvii Washington, Booker T., 287 weaving, 391–96 Weaving (Hrdy), 351 Weber, Max, 239, 253, 316 Webster, Daniel, 33, 35, 37–38, 37 Wechsler, Jeffrey, 297 Weed, Clive, 323–24, 328n1 Weems, Jason, 258–63 Weisenborn, Rudolph, 330 Welles, Orson, Citizen Kane, 296–97 West, Benjamin, 13, 14, 27 The Western Shore with Norman’s Woe (Lane), xvii Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 54, 64, 65, 241, 283 White, Clarence, 240 White, Mark A., 349–53 Whitfield, Kevin, 188 Whiting, Cécile, 195–201 Whitman, Henry, 398 Whitman, Sarah Wyman, 397–402; Cover Design for Charles Dudley Warner’s “Being a Boy”, 401; Peace

and Honor, 400; Roses—Souvenir de Villier le bel, 398, 399 Whitney, Thomas R., 45, 47 The Widow (Pittman), 290–91 Wilde, Oscar, 65, 283 William Hall (Williams), 15, 18 Williams, Francis, 15 Williams, Virgil, 64 Williams, William, 13–19; Benjamin Lay, 15, 17; William Hall, 15, 18 Wilmerding, John, xvii Wilson, Alona C., 162–67 Wilson, Ellen Axson, 50 Wilson, Kristina, 175–81 Wilson, Woodrow, 50 Winn, Roberta Harris, 248 Winnebago (Wa-kon-cha-hi-re-ga) in a Bark Lodge (Deas), 41, 42 Winter (Bloch), 253, 254 Women Artists: In All Ages and Countries (Ellet), 236 women artists. See female artists, marginalization of Women Artists in Paris, 1850–1900 (exhibition; Clark Art Institute), 50 Wood, Beatrice, xxi Wood, Grant, 134, 259–60, 261, 262; American Gothic, 115, 259; Revolt against the City (manifesto), 260, 261; Stone City, Iowa, 259 Woodruff, Hale Aspacio, 134, 137, 159, 169; The History of the Negro in California—Settlement and Development, 169 Woodson, Carter, 176 Wores, Theodore, 64–69; Chinese Restaurant, 64–65, 66; The Iris Flowers of Hori Kiri, Tokio, 67; The Lei Maker, 67, 68 Worker (Hayakawa), 139–40 The Wounded Pawnee (Deas), 41, 43, 43 The Wretched (Fuller), 82 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 351, 353, 358 Wyeth, Andrew, 73, 274 Young, Mahonri Sharp, 272 Yucca, Angustifolia and Cactus (Carver), 284, 285 Zurier, Rebecca, 131–37

INDEX

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