© COPYRIGHT 2010

Massillon Museum 121 Lincoln Way East Massillon, Ohio 44646

Christine Fowler Shearer, M.A. Executive Director

COVER IMAGE:

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS NUMBER: William Sommer (Cleveland/Akron) 2010905889 Blue Dairy Cart Oil on board | 16.5" x 23.5" | 1917–18

ISBN NUMBER: COLLECTION OF JOHN AND SUSAN HORSEMAN 978-0-97555-559-0 COURTESY OF KENY GALLERIES, COLUMBUS, OHIO

2010 Massillon Museum Board of Directors

Jeff McMahan, Chairman Judy Paquelet, Vice Chairman Kristin Hackenbracht, Treasurer Maude Slagle, Secretary EXHIBITION CURATED BY: Christine Fowler Shearer, M.A. Kathy Centrone Mel Herncane CATALOG EDITED BY: Rick Kettler Hugh J. Brown Carey McDougall Ann Caywood Brown Douglas Palmer Elizabeth Pruitt CATALOG DESIGNED BY: David W. Schultz Margy Vogt Keith Warstler

PRINTED BY: Bates Printing, Inc.

STAFF SUPPORT: Jill Malusky Alexandra Nicholis Scot Phillips Emily Vigil Christine Fowler Shearer, M.A. Executive Director, Massillon Museum

William H. Robinson, Ph.D. Curator of Modern European Art Cleveland Museum of Art

Massillon Museum Massillon, Ohio May 15, 2010—September 12, 2010

Riffe Gallery Columbus, Ohio November 3, 2010—January 9, 2011

Southern Ohio Museum and Cultural Center Portsmouth, Ohio March 5, 2011—May 29, 2011

Museum of Wisconsin Art West Bend, Wisconsin July 20, 2011—October 2, 2011 Lenders to the Exhibition

Akron Art Museum Frederick Biehle and Erika Hinrichs Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso University Daniel Bush Cleveland Artists Foundation Cleveland Museum of Art Clifford Law Offices, Chicago Columbus Museum of Art Michael and Elisabeth Travis Dreyfuss WITH THE SUPPORT OF: Lisa Biehle Files and Bruce Edward Files Susan and Gary Garrabrant Charles S. Hayes Family John and Susan Horseman Illinois State Museum Keny Galleries, Columbus, Ohio Michael Lawlor Massillon Museum Milwaukee Art Museum DC Moore Gallery, New York Museum of Wisconsin Art National Gallery of Art, Washington Richard Norton Gallery, Chicago Spanierman Gallery, LLC, New York Tregoning & Company, Cleveland Frederick R.Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota Western Illinois University Art Gallery Mitchell Wolfson, Jr.

Artists in the Exhibition

Gertrude Abercrombie Carl Hoeckner Ivan Albright Carl Holty Emil Armin Joe Jones Thomas Hart Benton Henry Keller Charles Biederman Albert H. Krehbiel August F. Biehle Dulah Evans Krehbiel Albert Bloch Lucius Kutchin Raymond Breinin Harold Noecker Shearer’s Food, Inc. Charles Burchfield Gregory Orloff Bonnie’s Engravers Gallery and Signs Arthur Osver Connect USA, Inc. Francis Chapin Aqua Ohio Alexander Corazzo Romolo Roberti Manierre Dawson Alice Schille Clara Dieke Willam S. Schwartz Rowena Fry William Sommer Leon Garland Lucia Stern Karl Gasslander Julia Thecla Todros Geller Howard Thomas Raphael Gleitsmann Paul B. Travis William Grauer Santos Zingale

4 Contents

Massillon Museum Board of Directors ...... 2

Exhibition Sponsors ...... 4

Lenders to the Exhibition ...... 4

Foreword ...... 7 Christine Fowler Shearer, M.A.

ModernismandAmerica...... 9 William H. Robinson, Ph.D. and Christine Fowler Shearer, M.A.

Illustrations of Works in the Exhibition The Ideal Form: Abstraction ...... 31 The Human Condition: Portraits ...... 42 Urban and Industrial Life ...... 52 The Social Order ...... 68 BeyondtheCity...... 78 Spirit and Imagination ...... 93

Biographical Sketches of Artists ...... 103

Works in the Exhibition...... 112

Bibliography ...... 117

Acknowledgments ...... 119

Foreword Christine Fowler Shearer, M.A.

The Massillon Museum is in a unique position. As the cultural center of Massillon, both figuratively and literally, the Museum has a responsibility to the community to provide quality exhibitions and programs. As a mid-sized regional museum, it has the opportunity to organize exhibitions that larger museums would not consider. Its geographic location places it in an area rich in cultural achievements. Why is all of this important? Because the Massillon Museum often takes the risk to tackle subjects, uncover artists, and provide new insights into topics that are often overlooked. The Museum organizes and travels the exhibitions to venues in Ohio and beyond, bringing these works to a wider audience. Beginning in 2005, with its exhibition Breaking With Tradition: Ohio Women Painters, 1870–1950, the Massillon Museum has looked at specific artists from the Midwestern region in new ways. This was followed by Midwestern Visions of Impressionism, which looked at artists who used Impressionistic styles in their work. Our current exhibition, Against the Grain: Modernism in the Midwest, is a natural extension of the first two traveling shows. As research was done for those, many of the artists in this current exhibition were discovered. Impressionism may have had a long life in America and the Midwest, but modernism was also developed and practiced alongside the later years of Impressionism. While many artists found their way with Impressionism, others experimented with new styles and techniques, new subject matter, and new points of view. It is these artists that are highlighted in this exhibition. Determining who to include is always a daunting task, and this exhibition was no different. The initial list of potential artists numbered more than 70 and was eventually narrowed down to 38. This means, of course, that there were many artists who could have been included and were not. The goal was to provide a substantial overview of the Midwest as it related to modernism up until 1950. With this in mind, the artists selected represent such well-known Midwesterners as Charles Burchfield, William Sommer, Manierre Dawson, Ivan Albright, Carl Holty and Charles Biederman. It also represents many artists who were well-known during their lifetime and are now largely forgotten in the greater American art world. Another difficult decision was determining which areas to include in our discussion of Midwest modernism. As the research for the exhibition progressed, it was decided to focus on the artistic centers of Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis and St. Louis. As with the two former exhibitions, there were many discoveries and surprises. While Indiana was an extremely important center of Impressionism, it was not a factor in the development of modernism in the Midwest. Chicago and Cleveland, often known for their progressive society and culture, provided the largest groupings of artists. And while Impressionist artists focused on the landscape and the idyll of rural life, modernist painters were not afraid to tackle difficult styles and subject matter. There have been a number of studies recently on many of the artists included in this exhibition, especially on groups of artists from Chicago and Cleveland, as well as individual exhibitions on some of the better-known artists. The goal here was to provide a broader context for modernism in all of the Midwest. It is our hope that those viewing this exhibition and catalog will see the breadth and depth of the artistic achievements of these modernists and will discover some new insights in the process.

7

Against the Grain: Modernism in the Midwest William H. Robinson, Ph.D., and Christine Fowler Shearer, M.A.

Modernism emerged in multiple places around the Westernized world during the second half of the nineteenth century, and it continued to evolve through most if not all of the following century. The term “modernism” refers to a series of progressive, even radical cultural movements that promote new, revolutionary forms of art. At its core, modernism entails a rejection of exhausted traditions, a passion for experimentation, an unrelenting questioning of accepted knowledge, and the feverish pursuit of the new. The movement’s most extreme form, avant-garde art, literally the “advanced guard,” derives its name from the French military term for a first-strike unit, or scouts penetrating behind enemy lines to gather intelligence in preparation for an offensive. Art critics used the term as a metaphor for revolutionary, forward-looking art that is far ahead of the mainstream. Cubism, abstraction, Surrealism, and other forms of extremely radical art are associated with the avant-garde. Modernism, by contrast, is broader in nature and can even include some forms of realism that interpret everyday life through the lens of a personal, contemporary sensibility.

The driving force behind the rise of modernism was not a few individuals living in Paris and New York, but rather, a broad array of ideas and forces that might be ascribed to the spirit of the age. The rapid industrialization and political revolutions that dominated life in nineteenth-century Europe were accompanied by immense upheavals in all realms of culture. Medieval and Renaissance societies, by contrast, were bound by rigid religious and class structures imposed by the church and state. As Galileo discovered, anyone who defied accepted wisdom risked condemnation as a dangerous heretic. The political revolutions that swept across America and Europe in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries destroyed the old social structures and ushered in a new age in which even members of the lower classes could challenge authority and envision shaping a new future by redefining themselves and their culture. During the same period, modern science insisted on challenging inherited assumptions and subjecting theoretical knowledge to the scrutiny of repeatable, verifiable testing.

Paralleling revolutionary events in politics and science, artists began to challenge traditional concepts of beauty, representation, even the nature of art itself. Originality, experimentation, and intellectual inquiry replaced older values. Viewing themselves as an “advanced-guard” responsible for initiating revolutionary change, artists invented an astonishing array of new styles and competing movements. The Impressionists began painting directly from nature while working outdoors and using small, quickly applied strokes of unmodulated color, rather than clearly outlined form, to convey their immediate, spontaneous response to the visual world. The Post-Impressionists insisted on the right to radically distort natural visual appearances for the purpose of personal, creative expression. Henri Matisse and the French Fauves aimed at the complete liberation of color from natural appearances.1 Pablo Picasso and the Cubists invented a new type of pictorial space that overturned 500 years of tradition, igniting a revolution in compositional structure that laid the groundwork for complete abstraction.

Old perceptions of time and geography collapsed during the nineteenth century. New ideas originating in one region spread with lightning speed to others, even across the Atlantic. The spread of cultural knowledge was accelerated by an increased democratization in the arts. The Louvre, for centuries a royal palace, was transformed during the French Revolution into a public museum, turning the former royal collections into a form of popular entertainment. Governments across Europe began sponsoring large public exhibitions, often held on an annual basis as a means of presenting the recent work of living artists, spurring economic activity, and guiding cultural development. Nations

9 competed against each other in organizing ever more extravagant world’s fairs featuring vast displays of art gathered from countries around the world. Newspapers and popular magazines circulated articles about these exhibitions, often filled with vituperous opinions and the latest scandals, all generating an atmosphere that encouraged artists to travel and experience the international art world first hand. Modernism arose in this new milieu of open societies and democratized taste, where the arts became an international public spectacle for mass consumption and artists felt free to invent new, ever more provocative forms of art.

There is a ubiquitous fiction in American art histories that narrowly ascribes the rise of modernism in this country to activities in New York and a few other cities along the East Coast. What this view fails to consider is that the United States is a land of immigrants, and that mass immigration brought with it direct and continuing contact between Europeans and Americans living in cities along the major waterways and transportation hubs in the interior. Cities around the Great Lakes, such as Cleveland and Detroit, Chicago and Milwaukee, were teeming with large, immigrant populations from Germany, Italy, Ireland, Russia, Eastern Europe, and Scandinavia. Sons and daughters of immigrants who trained at art schools in the Midwest grew up speaking German or other languages at home, then went abroad for further studies, eventually bringing back direct knowledge of cultural developments on the other side of the Atlantic and creating a direct line of communication that did not necessarily require going through New York or Philadelphia.

At its core, modernism entails a rejection of exhausted traditions, a passion for experimentation, an unrelenting questioning of accepted knowledge, “ and the feverish pursuit of the new. August Biehle (1885–1979), for example, was born in Cleveland to a family of German immigrants, studied at the Cleveland School of Art, then sought training in Munich, where he attended the first exhibition of the Blue Rider group in late 1911. He returned to Cleveland the following year painting in an avant-garde style influenced by German Expressionism, and brought with him a copy of the Blue Rider Almanac for the ” edification of the other modernists in the city. Biehle’s story is recorded in almost no general histories of American modernism, which tend to concentrate on interchange between artists in New York, Philadelphia, and Paris. Clearly, that is not the whole story, as the origins and the development of modernism in America art is much richer and more complex than the simplistic, diluted versions too often reported in standard art history surveys.

This exhibition concerns the history of modernism in the Midwest, an area defined by eight states: Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, Indiana, Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri. The term Midwest owes its origins to the early days of the republic, when the land beyond the Ohio River was considered the West. In 1789 the Continental Congress organized the region between the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers as the Northwest Territories.2 As William Gerdts observes, writers continued to describe this region as the West long after the frontier disappeared. Some definitions of the Midwest adhere strictly to this area, while others offer a slightly more expansive view that embraces Minnesota and the two states directly to the south, Iowa and Missouri. It seems reasonable to

10 include Iowa and Missouri since they both border Illinois and share the Mississippi River with other Midwestern states as a common source of commerce and cultural influence. For practical reasons this exhibition does not aim toward a comprehensive study of modernism throughout the eight states of the Midwest, but instead, focuses on major developments in its most important art centers, especially Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and St. Louis.3

Pin-pointing the exact origins of modernism in American art is not an easy task. During the 1880s artists in the Midwest, just like those along the East Coast, began experimenting with Impressionism. Many American artists encountered paintings by the French Impressionists by traveling abroad or attending touring exhibitions in this country. For the most part, American Impressionism was more cautious and mediated by traditional concerns with drawing, craftsmanship, and narrative than its European counterpart. Impressionism was widely practiced in this country throughout the early twentieth century, including by leading teachers at art schools and academies. It became the dominant trend in American art at a time when the country was in the throes of rapid change, and while industrialization was widening the gap between rich and poor. For many, Impressionism came to symbolize order and identity, rather than a revolt against tradition. Perhaps this explains why art historians tend to view American Impressionism as a final vestige of realism or naturalism, rather than as a sharp break with the past and the beginning of modernism.

Historians generally associate modernism in American art with the rise of Post- Impressionism, a catch-all term used by artists and critics of the period to describe Fauvism, Cubism, and a host of avant-garde styles that followed Impressionism.4 The unifying feature of these styles is the artist’s willingness to move beyond the representation of nature for the purpose of personal expression. Post-Impressionism is associated with the freedom to radically alter, distort, and rearrange the visual world to achieve a more inventive or emotionally compelling experience. The Post- Impressionists were bound only by the need to create authentically individual and original art, motivated as Wassily Kandinsky wrote, by the laws of “internal necessity.”

The rise of modernism in American art is typically described as originating with the activities of the Stieglitz group in New York and the Arnesberg Circle in Philadelphia.5 Photographer Alfred Stieglitz formed an association called the Photo-Secession in 1902, opened his “Little Galleries” of the Photo-Secession in 1905, and his gallery “291” in 1908. He became one of the foremost promoters of modernism in America, showing not only works by advanced American artists, but also by Picasso, Matisse, and other members of the European avant-garde. In recent years a broader view of American modernism has emerged that also embraces the urban realists known as the Eight or the Ash Can School, a group led by Robert Henri and which first exhibited together at the MacBeth Galleries in New York in 1908. Perhaps the most cataclysmic event associated with the origins and dissemination of modernism in America was the Armory Show. Officially titled The International Exhibition of Modern Art, this vast display of contemporary art from Europe and America opened in New York before traveling to Boston and Chicago. The presence of extremely radical forms of avant-garde art in the exhibition, including Cubist and Fauve paintings, incited a national scandal, topped by scathing comments from President Theodore Roosevelt. While many artists from the Midwest visited the exhibition, it was hardly their first exposure to European modernism.

11 OHIO

Ohio entered the union in 1803 and has enjoyed the oldest and most sustained artistic traditions of all the states in the Midwest.6 Cincinnati, founded in 1788, emerged as the region’s early cultural center. Due to its strategic location on the Ohio River, linked by steamboat to the Mississippi River and beyond, Cincinnati was the nation’s early gateway to the West and became one of the first cities west of the Alleghenies to develop a permanent art community. “Cincinnati was the earliest and most enduring art colony in Ohio,” observed James Keny. “In 1812, only twenty-four years after its founding, the city became the first in the state where novice artists could receive instruction.”7 The completion of the Ohio Canal in 1832 further enhanced the city’s status as a major shipping center by linking it to the port of Cleveland on the Great Lakes. A private drawing academy was established in Cincinnati as early as 1812, followed by Frank’s Gallery of Fine Arts in 1828, the Cincinnati Academy of Fine Arts in 1838, and the Cincinnati School of Design in 1853. Worthington Whittredge (1820–1910), William Sonntag (1822–1900), Robert S. Duncanson (1821–1872), Frank Duveneck (1848–1919), Robert Blum (1857–1903), and John Twachtman (1853–1902) were among the city’s most prominent artists of the nineteenth century. After 1900, however, as the center of economic activity in Ohio shifted northward, many of Cincinnati’s most advanced artists left the city, leaving it for others to move beyond Impressionism toward more radical avant-garde art.

Cleveland’s place in the history of American art has been sorely neglected by art historians. Founded in 1796, the city developed slowly as a transportation center until after the Civil War, when steel manufacturing and oil refining, led by John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company, transformed Cleveland into an economic dynamo. Euclid Avenue, home to the Rockefellers and other wealthy industrialists, became known as “Millionaire’s Row.” By 1900, Cleveland had become the fastest growing city in the United States and sixth in population. By 1930, the metropolitan area had grown into the nation’s third most populous, and the city ranked second only to Detroit in automobile manufacturing.

During the first two decades of the twentieth century, a distinctive modernist movement emerged in Cleveland. It was nourished by a large community of artists who came to work in the city’s commercial lithography, design, and book publishing industries. Others came to study at the Cleveland School of Art (today the Institute), originally established in 1882 as the Western Reserve School of Design for Women. A growing number of art galleries and exhibitions dedicated to showing works by the region’s artists, such as the Cleveland School of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art (est. 1913), provided opportunities for public display and cultural commerce.

During the early years of the twentieth century, Cleveland’s more ambitious and progressive artists grew restless with the conservative training offered at local academies and came to resent the narrow-minded tastes of the city’s wealthy elite.8 In an effort to promote experimental art, progressive artists banded together in 1911 to form two organizations, a “secessionist” group and the Kokoon Club, both dedicated to holding their own exhibitions and organizing themselves through meetings. The Secessionists lasted barely a year, but the Kokoon Club became a fixture in the city’s cultural life. Kokoon Club artists acquired an old tailor’s shop and transformed it into working studios for its members. They sponsored lectures and exhibitions, and organized cultural soirées, such as the Nuit Futuriste (futurist night) of 1915. The club became most infamously known for its annual Bal Masque (masked ball), a riotous event featuring exotic costumes, bizarre music, and risqué dances, often with Dadaist overtones. Although activity at the club declined during the 1940s, it did not disband until 1956.

12 Born to a family of German immigrants, Henry Keller (1869–1949) was one of the founders of the modernist movement in Cleveland. He began studying art at the Western Reserve School of Design for Women (which also admitted men) in 1887. He left Cleveland in 1890 to continue his training at art academies in Karlsruhe and Munich. Upon returning home, he began a long teaching career at the Cleveland School of Art that lasted from 1903 to 1945. He profoundly influenced several generations of Cleveland artists, perhaps most notably Charles Burchfield, his student from 1912 to 1916, and thereafter a life-long friend and colleague.

Keller directed his own summer school on family-owned farmland in Berlin Heights, Ohio, from 1903 to 1914. A colony of Cleveland artists gathered there, who, under Keller’s encouragement experimented with Fauvist color, radical simplifications of form, and Post-Impressionist compositional structures. Keller was the only Cleveland artist selected to exhibit in the 1913 Armory Show, but he was perhaps more important as a teacher and theoretician than as a painter. From 1910 to 1913 he collaborated with physiologist John MacCleod of Western Reserve Medical School on a series of experiments in color theory, the results of which they published in a study that condemned the dull, unimaginative color of academic painting, while conversely praising the Post- Impressionists and Fauves for their use of imaginative color dedicated not by fidelity to nature, but rather, by the laws of compositional harmony.9 In 1913 Keller gave five public lectures to Cleveland audiences that urged artists to become “creators” rather than imitators of nature. He praised Cubism and Futurism, and identified Paul Cézanne as the source of modern pictorial design, noting that the French artist unified his compositions through abstract structural rhythms. In his lectures Keller announced that art was entering a new era of abstraction and painters were on the verge of discovering a new, metaphysical dimension in art.

Keller was particularly impressed by Cézanne’s and Matisse’s use of the “blue outline” to define forms and create a sense of space without resorting to traditional modeling with gray or brown tones. Under Keller’s influence, the “blue outline” became a defining feature in the art of many Cleveland modernists. The word “outline” may be misleading because it actually refers to broad, flat planes of blue used to surround warm-colored forms and produce a dynamic sensation of space without resorting to traditional modeling, thus avoiding the loss of color intensity that comes with tonal shading. Matisse’s The Blue Nude of 1907, one of the most controversial paintings in the 1913 Armory Show, is a prominent example of this technique. Between 1911 and 1914, Keller produced a series of small, experimental works on paper, mostly in gouache and pastel, which ventured toward complete abstraction. Only a handful of these works have survived. The two paintings by Keller in this exhibition predate those experimental paintings, but Keller’s interest in modernist formal simplifications and color theory are already evident in The William Lee Farm, Berlin Heights, Ohio (cat. 45). After 1914, Keller returned to a more traditional approach, but his influence lived on in the art of Burchfield and his other pupils.

One could reasonably argue that William Sommer (1867–1949) rather than Burchfield was the most important modernist active in Cleveland during the first half of the twentieth century. Born in Detroit, Sommer became an apprentice lithographer at the age of fourteen, studied briefly in Germany, then worked as a commercial lithographer in New York until being lured to Cleveland to work for the Otis Lithograph Company in 1907. At Otis, Sommer developed a close friendship with William Zorach, at the time a young apprentice in his studio.10 Together, they played a crucial role in bringing modernism to Cleveland. Sommer and Zorach developed a disdain for commercial art and began painting together on weekends and evenings, fired by aspirations of

13 becoming “creative” artists. In 1910, Zorach made a trip to Paris, where he encountered paintings by Picasso and Matisse. Returning to Cleveland the following year, Zorach encouraged Sommer to experiment with pure, arbitrary color. “Bill immediately swung into more abstract painting,” Zorach recalled.11 In 1911, Sommer became one of the founders of the Kokoon Club. Zorach also joined and exhibited his avant-garde paintings with the Cleveland Secessionists.

Sommer began producing paintings with radically simplified forms and arbitrary, anti-naturalist color as early as 1911. At first applying intense Fauvist color with small, pointillist brushstrokes, he gradually moved toward larger, more powerful shapes. This new condensation of form, marked by large areas of pure color, is evident in Ray in a Red Collar of 1914 (cat. 11). Sommer’s view of art as a means of spiritual expression and as a reaction against the materialism of industrial America is reflected in his paintings The Pool and The Blue Cart of about 1918 (cat. 59 and 47). An ardent follower of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), Sommer aspired to go beyond the superficiality of material appearances and paint from pure, instinctual emotion. “Art,” he wrote in his notebooks, “is the creation of our spiritual, inward vision …we conceive with the unconscious.”12 Sommer also believed that artists should reveal the “vital life force” of objects and that the basis of creativity is a “fourth- dimensional consciousness.” Rather than conventional beauty, he aspired to an aesthetic of dynamic power and emotional ecstasy.13

Paralleling revolutionary events in politics and science, artists began to challenge traditional concepts of beauty, representation, even the “ nature of art itself. The Bach Chord (cat. 60) of 1923 reflects Sommer’s passion for exploring relationships between abstract color and music. In 1919 he developed a close friendship with Hart Crane, at the time a young Cleveland poet who admitted to deriving certain creative principles, such as synesthesia, from Sommer. Robert Bordner, a member of their modernist circle, recalled a conversation between the poet and painter that occurred” while they were walking near Sommer’s studio in an abandoned schoolhouse in the Brandywine Valley, just south of Cleveland. “Crane, Sommer and I were walking on the dirt road under a starry early winter sky,” Border recalled, “…we had been listening to Bill’s Bach records, and Bill was declaring that he could SEE in color the various movements of the music …Crane was fascinated and we got into whether poetry could be heard in colors too.”14

August Biehle (1885–1979) was another early advocate of avant-garde painting in Cleveland. As previously mentioned, Biehle attended the first exhibition of the Blue Rider group in Munich in late 1911 and returned to Cleveland the following year painting in a style strongly influenced by German Expressionism. Like Sommer, Biehle was the son of German immigrants and supported himself as a commercial lithographer. His intensely colored paintings suggest a reaction against the materialism of the business world where he made his living. He began exhibiting these new works in 1912 and joined the Kokoon Club the following year. An extremely versatile artist, Biehle moved effortlessly between various avant-garde styles, from Fauvism to Cubism, later using them to create personal interpretations of the Ohio landscape. This early interest

14 in Cubism can be seen in Cleveland West Side, Hillside Houses of about 1914 (cat. 29), while Changing Seasons of 1935 (cat. 5) transforms a rural landscape with trees into a dynamic, almost Futurist composition in which planes of kaleidoscopic color move through space with tremendous velocity, forming complex patterns and graceful rhythmic movements, comparable to the movements of a dance or a musical composition.

Charles Burchfield (1893–1967) is sometimes described as an essentially self-taught artist who knew nothing of European modernism. That is complete nonsense. Burchfield grew up in Salem, Ohio, and came to Cleveland in 1912 to study at the Cleveland School of Art in hopes of becoming a commercial illustrator. He spent four years at the school and maintained close ties with the city’s artists for the rest of his life, even after moving to Buffalo in 1921. Through friendships with Keller and others, Burchfield quickly became part of the city’s community of progressive artists. In the fall of 1914, he began attending the soirées and exhibitions of the Kokoon Club, where he encountered the Fauvist paintings of Biehle, Zorach, and Sommer. In March 1915, Burchfield made a special trip to the Brandywine Valley to meet “Big Bill” Sommer and exchange ideas. It is no coincidence that this was the year Burchfield painted his first modernist compositions, using radically condensed forms and arbitrary colors. After absorbing Keller’s instruction in the theoretical principles of Cubism, Fauvism, abstract design, and the “blue outline,” Burchfield added his own subjective interpretation of the world around him, stressing spirituality and emotional content.

While the flat, planar forms and compressed space in Twilight Moon of 1916 (cat. 58) owe directly to Keller’s lectures on Cézanne’s method of structuring space, the most seminal influence on Burchfield, the one that made him decide to abandon commercial illustration and become a creative artist, more likely came from Sommer. Fluent in German, Sommer was broadly familiar with philosophy and an ardent admirer of Friedrich Nietzsche. Like Zorach, Sommer detested the work he produced at the lithography shop and threw down his crayons in disgust from time to time and disappeared for days on drinking binges. “Bill hated to go back to his job,” a co-worker recalled. “He reminded us constantly that he was being crucified at the lithographic plant.”15 Many Cleveland modernists shared Sommer’s sense of alienation and disgust with a society obsessed with the pursuit of material wealth. They sought release from this situation through art based on emotional, spiritual experience. It was in this milieu that Burchfield discovered that art is not just a trade, craft, or technical skill, but a creative endeavor. The expressive distortions of form and color in Burchfield’s painting Noon of 1917 (cat. 20) signal his emergence as one of the city’s leading modernists.

Paul Travis (1891–1975), a native of Wellsville, Ohio, entered the Cleveland School of Art in 1913 and joined Keller and Burchfield’s circle of modernists. Travis remained in France after being discharged from the army in 1918 and spent over a year painting abroad. Known for his facility at mediating between various modernist styles, he fluidly combined a Cubist spatial structure of merging and intersecting planes with brilliant Fauve color in Chartres Cathedral of 1947 (cat. 7), a reminiscence of his wartime experiences in France. Travis returned to Cleveland in 1920 and taught at the Cleveland School of Art from 1927 to 1957. His ability to interpret the American scene through the formal vocabulary of modernist design is evident in his painting The Grand Canyon of about 1950 (cat. 57).

Clara Deike (1881–1964) studied under Henry Keller at the Cleveland School of Art from 1909 to 1912, and spent her summers painting at his artist’s colony in Berlin Heights. She began exploring Keller’s method of using the blue outline to produce intensely-colored, Fauvist paintings as early as 1912, and emerged as Cleveland’s most progressive female painter of the 1910s and 1920s. From 1921 to 1923 Deike studied

15 with Hugh Breckenridge in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and from 1925 to 1927 with Hans Hofmann in Capri and Munich. During this decade, she became increasingly interested in compositional structure, toned down her palette, and began fracturing forms into Cubist planes, as seen in her brooding Munich Self-Portrait of 1922 (cat. 17). Her painting Landscape of 1948 (cat. 48) also interprets an American scene subject through Cubist compositional principles. Unlike the shallow and compressed space of conventional Cubism, however, planes of floating, diaphanous color energize and unite a deeply recessive space by flowing continuously from the foreground into the distance and back again.

William Grauer (1895–1985) was born in Philadelphia and studied at the Philadelphia School of Industrial Design from 1914 to 1919. In 1920 he moved to Akron and opened a studio in nearby Cleveland. He became particularly well-known for painting murals in public buildings in Cleveland during the 1920s, at the Century of Progress exhibition in Chicago in 1933, and at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. Like many Cleveland artists, Grauer shifted fluently between modernism and a more conventional American scene realism. His painting Studio Interior of 1930 (cat. 36) is an intriguingly beautiful rendering of a painter at work in the studio, with a view of a modern city, probably Cleveland, seen through a window. The expert handing of fragmented forms, the transparent planes merging and intersecting in space, and the delicate rendering of the figures on the drawings in the foreground, provide evidence of Grauer’s mastery over Cubist formal vocabulary.

Alice Schille (1869–1955) of Columbus was one of Ohio’s leading modernists and among the foremost watercolor painters of her time. By no means a “regional” artist, she traveled and exhibited internationally. She attended the Cézanne retrospective of 1907 at the Salon d’Automne in Paris, discovered the paintings of Picasso and Matisse while visiting Gertrude Stein’s apartment, and knew the paintings of the Neo-Impressionists and Nabis first hand. The daughter of a prosperous soda merchant, Schille received her early art training at the Columbus Art School before entering the Art Students League in New York in 1897 and studying under William Merritt Chase at the New York School of Art in 1898. She also attended Chase’s summer school at Shinnecock, Long Island, in 1899. Chase regarded her as one of his finest students and they agreed to exchange paintings. Schille made her first trip to Europe in 1902 and attended the Académie Colarossi in Paris from 1903 to 1904. Although she subsequently returned to Columbus to begin a teaching career that lasted from 1904 to 1948, Schille remained an inveterate traveler for the rest of her life, spending every summer from 1903 to 1914 in France, where she would return in the 1920s and 1930s.16

Schille brought a modernist sensibility to her preferred medium of watercolor painting. By 1911 she was experimenting with brilliant Fauve color, often applied in a pointillist technique of short, broken brushstrokes. She recorded the most salient aspects of a subject quickly and spontaneously, taking full advantage of the transparency of watercolor to achieve brilliantly luminous effects of light and color. During the 1920s and 1930s she moved away from the delicate, broken touch of her early work toward a style of large, ever more powerful and intensely colored forms, as seen in Coffee Worker’s Return of 1930 (cat. 40), painted on one of her visits to Latin America. Her masterful handling of the watercolor medium is evident in the spontaneous application of paint, which she allowed to expressively run and drip. Color intensity is heightened even further through Schille’s expert integration of the white paper support into the compositional design. The painting’s theme may reflect the influence of meeting Diego Rivera in Mexico and their shared passion for rendering populist subjects in a modernist style of simplified planar forms.

16 Raphael Gleitsmann (1910–1995) was born in Dayton, attended the Cleveland School of Art, and spent much of his life working in Akron. His paintings of American scene subjects, such as Untitled (woman washing beside farmhouse) of about 1940 (cat. 52), are tinged with feelings of ominous foreboding and a disturbingly Surrealist, dreamlike quality commonly associated with Magic Realism.17 The turbulent black clouds gathering over the tiny figures in Gleitsmann’s painting, especially the woman washing clothes with her child and the man walking along a deserted street and casting a long shadow, suggest there is an unpleasant, hidden narrative unfolding in this apparently routine moment in the life of an ordinary family in rural Ohio. An even more powerful sense of impending death is felt in Gleitsmann’s Château at Aulnoise of 1946 (cat. 66), depicting an historic eighteenth-century building in northeast France near Épernay. The leaden sky hovers ominously over the ruined château and denuded trees, perhaps alluding to painful memories of Gleitsmann’s experiences as an American G.I. advancing toward Germany during World War II.

Lucius Kutchin (1901–1936) studied under Alice Schille at the Columbus School of Art and became one of the city’s leading modernists of the 1920s and 1930s.18 Kutchin’s mother died from tuberculosis when he was thirteen years old, an early tragedy that may explain the melancholic tone of his portraits. Upon entering the Columbus School of Art in 1921, he studied with Schille and Charles Rosen, artists who introduced him to modernism. Kutchin also became enamored with the modernist paintings in the collection of Columbus native Ferdinand Howald. From 1922 to 1924, Kutchin simultaneously attended the Columbus School of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he studied under Henry Beckenridge and Arthur B. Carles. While in Philadelphia, Kutchin attended the lectures of Albert Barnes and came to know his remarkable collection of paintings by such modern masters as Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, and Modigliani.

After traveling through Europe in 1927–28, Kutchin returned to America and spent several years living in New Mexico, where he developed a deep attachment to the spiritual qualities of the primitive landscape. In 1931 he moved back to Columbus and assumed a leadership role in the city’s modernist circles. In 1933 he received several commissions to paint murals in public buildings under the sponsorship of the Public Works of Art Program. Even as the tide of opinion moved in the direction of American scene painting and regionalism, Kutchin published articles in The Columbus Dispatch defining his personal vision of modernism. Among his most personal and haunting works are a series of paintings of half-length figures, such as Girl in Green of about 1930 (cat. 15), in which a large, powerful figure confronts the viewer, yet remains distant and aloof. The psychological isolation of the figure in this painting is conveyed through her melancholic expression, blank stare, and the exaggerated shape of her large eyes. The reductive, planar forms of her body are rendered all the more powerful by the complementary color contrast between her intensely green dress and orange hair. Nannette Maciejunes observes that this portrait is “disturbing for its psychological disjunction: the subtle decorative charm is in sharp contrast with the emotional undercurrent of the figure’s isolation. And though she projects into the viewer’s space, the girl’s hands act as a barrier; she is distant, unapproachable.”19

Kutchin painted Atalaya—Above Santa Fe of 1936 (cat. 56), a reminiscence of his years in New Mexico, during the last year of his life. The painting reflects his deeply held conviction that modernist painting must be charged with highly expressive, personal meanings. The brilliant light, intense colors, energetic brushwork, and surging muscular shapes infuse the landscape with animalist vitality. Kutchin was just beginning to acquire a national reputation for such paintings when he died that year from bronchial pneumonia at the age of thirty-five.

17 ILLINOIS

Cultural activity in Illinois, admitted into the union in 1818 as the twenty-first state, was concentrated in the city of Chicago.20 Founded in 1833 along the southwest shores of Lake Michigan on the site of a former military outpost, Chicago quickly established itself as one of the nation’s preeminent transportation centers. The completion of the Illinois and Michigan Canal in 1848 connected the city to the Illinois River and by extension to the entire waterways of the mighty Mississippi. By the 1850s Chicago was linked by rail to New York, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis, and with the completion of the transcontinental railroad, to San Francisco and the far west by 1869. Grain, livestock, iron ore, and steel flowed through the “city of big shoulders,” turning it into a prototypical American boom town that attracted artists from across the country.

Modernism burst onto the Chicago art scene with unexpected vitality during the early years of the twentieth century. There was nothing in the city’s previous history that could have predicted such an event. William Gerdts divides the early history of art in Chicago into three periods: the 1830s to the Great Fire of 1871; the years of recovery to the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893; and the years after the exposition until about 1920.21 The city’s leading artists of the nineteenth century, such as George Peter Alexander Healy (1813–1894) and John Vanderpoel (1857–1911), were competent yet relatively conventional painters of realist portraits, still lifes, and landscapes. They belonged to an art community that formed at a remarkably early stage in the city’s development, marked by the establishment of the Chicago Exhibition of the Fine Arts in 1859 and the Chicago Art Union in 1860. The Chicago Academy of Design, a school and gallery for members, was organized in 1866 and lasted until 1877 or 1879, when its collections were acquired by a group who formed the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, later renamed the Art Institute of Chicago. The Chicago Society of Artists was founded in 1888, the Palette and Chisel Club in 1895, and the Art Academy of Chicago in 1896. Art journalism also flourished in Chicago, marked by the founding of the Art Journal in 1867 and the Art Review in 1870.

The Art Institute of Chicago, from its inception, served as both an art school and a museum that aspired to become the dominant cultural institution in the Midwest through an active program of organizing special exhibitions and showing “new” work produced in New York and abroad. While it developed an ambitious exhibition program, the Art Institute did not add any modern works to its permanent collection until the 1920s. As art historian Wendy Greenhouse observes, “the Art Institute’s ambivalent early relationship with modernism epitomizes Chicago’s ‘pursuit of the new,’ which blended passion and caution, fascination with innovation and an impulse to accommodate the new to certain established fundamentals.”22 The city’s resistance to new styles was epitomized by the scandalized reaction to the Armory Show of 1913 and the burning of an effigy of Matisse on the museum’s steps.

Even in this hostile environment, modernism began to take root in the art of a few, isolated individuals, followed by increasingly diverse circles of influential artists. Greenhouse comments, “from the late 1910s through the 1930s, in particular, Chicago boasted a number of small but lively avant-garde groups whose members produced unconventional work and defied the jury system governing the Art Institute’s influential annual salons.”23 Several broad trends are discernable in the development of modernist art in Chicago. First, the emergence of a fascination with avant-garde art and abstraction, especially in the art of Manierre Dawson, but which would be followed by others in coming decades. Second, many artists became passionately devoted to expressing the dynamism of modern urban life through expressive distortions of form, intensified color, and energetic brushwork. Emil Armin, Raymond Breinin, Francis Chapin, Rowena Fry,

18 Karl Gasslander, Albert Krehbiel, Gregory Orloff, and Romolo Roberti were among the most devoted interpreters of the city and its habitants. Third, certain Chicago modernists turned their art into a means of critically analyzing and exposing inequities in the social system, as evident in the paintings of Leon Garland and Carl Hoeckner. Fourth, a fascination with dreamlike, fantasy subjects, which art critics associated with Magic Realism and Surrealism, emerged as one of the dominant trends in Chicago art of the 1930s and 1940s, especially in the paintings of Ivan Le Lorraine Albright, Gertrude Abercrombie, Harold Noecker, William Schwartz, and Julia Thecla.

Among the first painters in history to explore complete abstraction, Manierre Dawson (1887–1969) was Chicago’s most fascinating artist of the early twentieth century. Although passionate about art from an early age, he made a compromise with his father and studied civil engineering at the Armour Institute of Technology (now the Illinois Institute of Technology). After receiving his Bachelor of Science degree in 1909, Dawson began working in the drafting room of Holabird and Roche, Chicago’s largest architectural firm. His venture into abstract painting seems all the more remarkable considering that he received his only formal artistic training while attending South Division High School.

The driving force behind the rise of modernism was not a few individuals living in Paris and New York, but rather, a broad array of ideas and forces “ that might be ascribed to the spirit of the age. Dawson’s early work of 1906 and 1907 is wholly original and based on a number of influences from his work as a civil engineer, his understanding of Arthur Wesley Dow’s compositional principles, the aesthetic theories of James McNeill Whistler, and the study of Japanese prints. Deeply attracted to mathematical principles of order, Dawson believed that painting, just as with architecture and music, should not be dependent” upon the imitation of nature. Rather, his aim was to create art based on invention and conceptual principles of compositional construction. Henry Adams boldly asserts, “Dawson was the first painter to create a language of abstract form that was expressively as rich as representations of the real world.”24 Differential Complex of 1910 (cat. 1), painted shortly after Dawson graduated from engineering school, embodies this new approach to the creative process. Although the lines and circles may suggest subconscious references to numeric signs, coordinates, graphs, pencils, and erasers, the composition remains a fundamentally abstract arrangement of transparent arching shapes that seem to rise with a joyous spiritual vitality, illuminated like stained-glass windows and buoyed upward by pink and orange colors.25

In June 1910, Dawson made his first trip to Europe and spent six months visiting England, France, Switzerland, Italy and Germany. His journals record several significant encounters with modern art in Paris, most notably, a visit to Gertrude Stein’s apartment, with its astonishing collection of works by Matisse and Picasso, and discovering Paul Cézanne’s paintings at the gallery of Ambroise Vollard. When Dawson returned to the United States in December 1910, he began painting in a style strongly influenced by Cubism.

Dawson entered into one of his most productive period in 1913, the year he left Holabird and Roche. While occasionally employed through pickup work for architectural and

19 design firms, he was frequently without a job over the next few years, which gave him ample time to paint. Hercules I of 1913 (cat. 2) depicts the Greek hero running toward the right. As the figure’s barely recognizable body slices through space, forms are shattered into a mosaic of flat, geometric planes. The fast-moving arms and head become a blur of dynamic continuity into space, creating a kinetic experience that suggests some familiarity with Futurism and perhaps Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2., the most scandalous painting in the Armory Show, a work one art critic derisively labeled “an explosion in a shingle factory.”

In 1914, Dawson married Lily Boucher and moved to a rural area near along the upper, western part of Michigan. He turned family-owned property near Ludington into a fruit farm and raised a family, while continuing to paint occasionally. His painting, Desert of 1920 (cat. 3), depicts an abstract landscape with trees, interpreted through a highly personalized use of Cubist space and compositional structures. The delicate, minutely fragmented shapes in Hercules I have been replaced by much larger, more powerful planes of earth and sky, which are joined together by assertive, dark lines that move continuously throughout the composition in rhythmic movements. While the dark lines snake in and out of space, they also push forms upright and vertical to the picture surface, thereby welding the various parts of the composition together in a manner reminiscent of Piet Mondrian’s Tree Series of 1911. During this period, Dawson typically established a central color chord, then applied others according to a limited set of related variables. Another of Dawson’s characteristic formal devices was the “ghost form,” whereby a central shape was established that was more transparent than the surrounding outline.26

Albert Krehbiel (1873–1945) painted intensely-colored, vibrant images of Chicago that suggest a highly optimistic and celebratory view of life in the modern city. Born in Denmark, Iowa, and raised in Newton, Kansas, Krehbiel studied at School of the Art Institute of Chicago and went to Paris on a traveling scholarship in 1903. Despite having a permanent home in Chicago, Krehbiel frequently spent his summers painting in art colonies in California and Santa Fe. For a period of six years he lived in Saugatuck, Michigan, where he taught landscape classes at the Art Institute’s Summer School of Painting. Michigan Avenue Bridge of 1920 (cat. 21) and Evening Rush Hour in the Chicago Loop of 1926 (cat. 22) effectively convey a sense of the speed and vitality of modern urban life through the artist’s energetic brushwork and high-keyed color.

Krehbiel’s wife, Dulah Marie Llan Evans Krehbiel (1875–1951), was also born in Iowa. She studied at School of the Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League in New York, as well at the Charles Hawthorne School in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and at the New York School of Art under William Merritt Chase. Initially a successful illustrator and part of Chicago’s Tree Studio group, Dulah married Albert in 1906 and spend the rest of her life working closely together with him, often as his traveling companion. She began painting in a more imaginative, modernist style on trips to California and New Mexicoin1918to1923. Music of 1920 (cat. 61), an idealistic vision of intensely colored figures performing in a mountainous landscape, seems inspired by an attempt to convey an association between invented colors and musical sounds according to the theory of synesthesia, which holds that simulating one sensory organ can produce involuntary reactions in other organs.

Carl Hoeckner (1883–1972), perhaps best known for his paintings about war and political and social injustice, was born in Munich, Germany, and trained in Hamburg and Cologne. After emigrating to the United States in 1910, he settled in Chicago and began working in the advertising department of Marshall Fields. In 1929 he began teaching industrial design at Art Institute, and later became director of the graphics

20 division of the Illinois Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. While supporting himself as a commercial artist and teacher, Hoeckner turned to fine art for self-expression. His painting The Yes Machine of about 1930 (cat. 38) was originally part of a larger composition that he later cut down. A photograph of the painting from a solo exhibition in 1944 shows a now-absent lower portion with a reclining nude female figure lying beneath the men leering over her in the lower foreground.27 The social class structure is symbolically represented through the dark mass of working-class men gathered around a gluttonous capitalist dressed in a tuxedo and drinking champagne. While bestial workers look enviously over the capitalist’s shoulder at the food on his table, a nude woman barters her body for his favors.

Leon Garland (1896–1941), a Jewish immigrant from Russia, was another socially committed modernist. Born in the village of Borbruisk, Garland settled in Chicago after arriving in the United States in 1913. He studied art at Hull House, a settlement community for newly arrived immigrants on the city’s near South side, and at the School of the Art Institute. He expressed his feelings of solidarity with common laborers in The Blacksmith, a painting of about 1940 (cat. 39), in which the forceful striking of an anvil is conveyed through fractured Cubist planes and compressed muscular forms.

Often associated with Magic Realism, Ivan Le Lorraine Albright (1897–1983) developed a unique, hyper-realist style for conveying a mysterious sense of disease, death, and decay behind the facade of everyday appearances. Although born to a family of artists, Albright was at first determined not to follow in the footsteps of his father, Adam Albright (1862–1957), a noted landscape and portrait painter, or his twin brother, Malvin Albright (1897–1983), a successful sculptor. After enlisting in the army during World War I, Ivan spent part of 1918-1919 producing medical drawings at the hospital of the American Expeditionary Force in Nantes, France. At the hospital he filled sketchbook after sketchbook with drawings of wounded soldiers, paying clinical attention to detail and developing a feeling for the vulnerability of human flesh. The life-altering experience would be crucial to his artistic development.

Upon returning home, Albright decided to become an artist and entered the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1920. After graduating in 1923, he sought further training at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia and the National Academy of Design in New York. In 1927 he moved back to Illinois with his twin brother, and they established a common studio with their father in a former Methodist church in Warrenville, part of the greater Chicago metropolitan area.

Albright was persistently preoccupied with the challenge of depicting the human figure ravaged by time. As early as 1926 he was using his art to explore the meaning of life, the relationship of spirit and matter, the effects of time, and the inevitability of death.28 His style continued to mature through 1928 and 1929, the period when he developed his highly personal technique of using painstaking detail to forecast the inevitable decay of human flesh. During this same period, he began constructing elaborate setups for his paintings that sometimes took months to construct. He also increased the emotional resonance of his paintings by giving them poetic titles. When combined with the appropriate image, these evocative titles encourage the viewer to imagine a complex narrative behind mundane moments culled from everyday life. At first glance, the woman in There Were No Flowers Tonight (cat. 13) appears to be a typical dancer sitting for a brief rest, but upon closer inspection, her features show signs of age and she seems saddened by some unknown event or circumstance.

Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–1977) was among the most prominent Chicago artists associated with Magic Realism. She was a complicated person celebrated for her

21 warmth, humor and generous spirit, but also known as a recluse and an alcoholic. Born to a family of traveling opera singers, she spent her early years in Aledo, Illinois, before the family settled in the Hyde Park area of Chicago. After graduating from the University of Illinois in 1929 with a degree in Romance languages, she briefly studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the American Academy of Design in New York. By 1932 she was painting on her own and exhibiting at galleries. In 1934 she began working as a full-time artist for the Works Progress Administration. She began to form strong relationships with other artists, writers, and musicians in the city. A gifted jazz pianist in her own right, she developed close friendships with leading musicians of the period, including Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Sarah Vaughan, and occasionally performed with them.

Abercrombie’s paintings reflect her regional identification and her reliance on dreams for inspiration. She once wrote, “Surrealism is meant for me because I am a pretty realistic person but don’t like all I see. So I dream that it is changed. Then I change it to the way I want it. It is almost always pretty real. Only mystery and fantasy have been added. All foolishness has been taken out. It becomes my own dream.”29 Her feelings of being homely, unloved and inadequate were a constant source of psychological dis- tress, and most of her paintings are essentially self-portraits that convey her personal feelings of emptiness and inadequacy. Simple block house, horses, trees, rocks, pumps and wells, and a solitary figure representing Abercrombie herself, are often present in her paintings of the late 1930s and beyond. Many of these elements, along with barren and fruitful trees, appear in The Pump (cat. 63), depicting a lone figure approaching a hill beneath a somber gray sky. Untitled (dunes) of 1939 (cat. 65) also features a lone figure, this time standing before the sea and a vast, barren landscape with dunes rising from the sand. The tiny figure, lost in an sterile world of infinite nothingness, evokes feelings of despair and hopelessness.

Modernism arose in this new milieu of open societies and democratized taste, where the arts became an international public spectacle for mass consumption and artists felt free to invent new, “ ever more provocative forms of art. The works of Julia Thecla (1896–1973), another Chicago artist associated with Magic Realism, are principally concerned with exploring an inner realm of dreams and imagination. Born in 1896, she paid for her own art lessons at the age of fifteen and in 1920 enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. As an employee of the Federal Art Project of the WPA during the 1930s, she finally obtained a regular monthly income that gave her the stability to become a full-time artist. It was during this” period that she developed close friendships with Ivan Albright and Gertrude Abercrombie, and she began to focus on themes of fantasy and imagination in her art. Men rarely appear in these paintings, which typically feature a lone or isolated female figure, often a young girl who has not fully matured and lives in a realm of mystery. Maureen McKenna speculates that these images are autobiographical and function as a personal journal for the artist’s own dreams and fantasies.30

Thecla painted Mary in Blue Shoes of 1939 (cat. 71) while working for the FAP-WPA. She became fascinated with the ballet, a major theme in her paintings of the 1930s to the 1950s, through friendships with dancer Mary Guggenheim and choreographer Bernice Holmes, also a prima ballerina. This painting depicts Guggenheim asleep,

22 separated from the other dancers by a green curtain. Guggenheim is like many of Thecla’s dreamers, a woman alone and oblivious to the outside world. The enigmatic appearance of a large rabbit in the foreground suggests that the scene may represent a bizarre dream, perhaps as envisioned by the sleeping woman.

Finally, it should be noted that immigrant artists and members of the city’s diverse ethnic communities played a major role in the vitality of modernism in Chicago. Todros Geller (1889–1949), who painted Untitled (figure with black birds) in 1929 (cat. 14), was known as Chicago’s “dean of Jewish artists.” Born in the Ukrainian city of Vinnitsa, Geller first studied in Odessa before emigrating with his family to Montreal in 1906. In 1913 he moved to Chicago and continued his art studies at the School of the Art Institute. A visit to Palestine in 1929 inspired an interest in biblical themes and Chagall-like fantasies of shtetl life. As a teacher at Hull House, the Jewish People’s Institute, and the College of Jewish Studies, Geller inspired a younger generation of artists to participate in the life of the community and portray Jewish themes.31 He was also active in the mural and graphics division of the Federal Art Project in Illinois.

Russian-born William Schwartz (1896–1977) emigrated to America at the age of seventeen and entered the School of the Art Institute three years later. A versatile artist, Schwartz painted abstractions linked with music, as well as portraits, landscapes, still lifes, allegories, and figures. He also focused on scenes of Jewish life in the shtetl of the “old country,” the ethnic neighborhoods of Chicago, and scenes of urban and rural America. Although Dancing the Blues Away of 1935 (cat. 43) and Mountain Landscape of 1940 (cat. 54) depict what might otherwise appear like standard American scene subjects, Schwartz transforms them into powerful modernist compositions through a combination of expressively distorted forms, brilliant color, and flattened and compressed space.

WISCONSIN

Despite becoming a territorial possession of the United States in 1783, Wisconsin did not attain statehood until 1848. Economic activity in the southern half of the state was dominated by wheat farming, while the lumber industry prevailed in the north. When wheat production fell into decline in the late nineteenth century due to devastated soil fertility, farmers shifted to dairy goods. Wisconsin’s two largest cities, Milwaukee and Madison, were both founded in 1836. Located on the western shores of Lake Michigan directly north of Chicago, Milwaukee emerged as a competitor of its southern rival in grain and livestock shipping, brewing, and industrial manufacturing. As early as the 1840s economic opportunities attracted a vast influx of immigrants to Wisconsin, the greatest number coming from Germany and Poland. Between 1850 and 1930 the state’s population grew from 300,000 to nearly 3,000,000 people, and Milwaukee’s from 20,000 to over 570,000.

Wisconsin’s earliest artists were itinerant painters. In 1823 Samuel Seymour, the first of many painters to focus on the Native American themes, began sketching at Prairie du Chien, a major American Fur Company post. Other artists, such as James Otto Lewis (1799–1858), Peter Rindisbacher (1806–1834) and Charles Deas (1818–1867) also recorded the landscape and life around Prairie de Chien. George Catlin (1796–1872) painted landscapes and Native American subjects while traveling from Green Bay to Fort Crawford in 1836. After the 1850s a more permanent community of artists began to form in Milwaukee, a city whose Germanic heritage and proximity to Chicago would be crucial factors in the development of art in Wisconsin. According to William Gerdts “the majority of professional artists to appear in the state after midcentury were

23 German-born and trained, and a higher percentage of aspiring Wisconsin artists studied in Germany than those of any other state.”32 One of the more prominent early Wisconsin artists, Alexander Mueller (1872–1935), was a Milwaukee native born of German parents. Mueller studied at the Wisconsin Art Institute from 1891 to 1894, in Weimar from 1894 to 1895, and in Munich from 1895 to 1899. When he returned to Milwaukee, he was considered a leading Tonalist landscape painter. In 1901 he became the director of the Art Students League of the Milwaukee Art Association and taught at the Wisconsin School of Art. Mueller established a larger art school in 1912 that eventually evolved into the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

A community of art galleries and exhibition venues did not develop in Milwaukee until the late nineteenth century. The Milwaukee Art Gallery, the earliest known attempt to create an ongoing exhibition space, was founded in 1874 as an offshoot of the first Milwaukee Art Association, which had a brief duration and an unknown later history. In 1881 a committee was formed to organize a series of art exhibitions that were presented at Milwaukee’s Exposition Hall on a continuing basis until 1900. In 1882 local art professionals and businessmen formed the Milwaukee Museum of Fine Arts, which included an art school and an exhibition gallery. The gallery disappeared by 1884, but the educational wing continued as the Milwaukee Art School.33 In 1888, a prominent local businessman established the Layton Art Gallery, the city’s first establishment of its kind. It later merged with several other local art organizations to become the Milwaukee Art Center and eventually the Milwaukee Art Museum.

Modernism developed later in Wisconsin than in Illinois or Ohio, but the state did produce a number of important painters who explored abstraction and non-objective art. Carl Holty (1900–1973) is perhaps the most well-known modernist associated with Wisconsin. Born in Frieburg, Germany, Holty grew up in Milwaukee and attended Marquette University with the intention of becoming a doctor. In 1919 he decided to become a painter and enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago. From 1920 to 1921 he studied at the Parsons School of Design and the National Academy of Design in New York. In 1923 he returned to Chicago and supported himself for several years by painting portraits. In 1926 he traveled to Munich to enroll at the Royal Academy, but on the advice of a colleague, studied instead with Hans Hofmann, whose theories of modern art and abstraction greatly influenced Holty’s development. In 1930 Holty moved to Paris, where two years later he joined the Abstraction-Création group at the invitation of his friend and fellow painter, Robert Delaunay. Under the influence of Piet Mondrian, Alexander Calder, Jean Arp, Joan Miró, and other artists in Paris, Holty began painting completely abstract compositions by 1935.

Holty returned to the United States and lived in York from 1935 to 1940, but visited Wisconsin periodically and became involved in the state’s cultural life. Under the auspices of the Federal Forum of the Works Progress Administration, he delivered a series of lectures about modern art to various audiences in Wisconsin. In 1937 he became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists in New York, a group dedicated to providing exhibition opportunities for abstract artists when few existed. Other members of the group included Arshile Gorky, Stuart Davis, Ad Reinhardt, Burgoyne Diller, and George L. K. Morris. Holty remained an active leader of Abstract American Artists until 1944, when he left after concluding that they had accomplished their goal of bringing critical attention to abstract art.

Holty returned to figuration in the late 1940s, but continued to interpret the human form through Cubist compositional principles. Pink Lady of 1948 (cat. 8 ) depicts a woman apparently seated in chair and wearing a hat, while Europa, also of 1948 (cat. 9), features a nude woman riding on a bull in a modernist interpretation of the rape of

24 Europa, derived from the ancient Greek myth in which Zeus transforms himself into a bull and whisks away the beautiful maiden Europa. The figures in both paintings are defined only by short, broken contour lines. “The point,” Holty wrote, “is to avoid any mass or silhouette or closed oval whose character removes it from the unity of the surface even in a minute degree. Every bit of ‘background’ must be dissolved and brought into two-dimensional equilibrium with the forms and lines invented.”34 Holty taught at Washington University in St. Louis from 1950 to 1952, and remained an important advocate for modernist art in America until his death in 1973.

Lucia Stern (1895–1989), another important modernist from Wisconsin, explored abstraction in her paintings, sculptures, textiles, and collage constructions. She originally studied literature and music from 1918 to 1922, but found herself drawn more toward the visual arts and began painting without the benefit of formal training. In 1930 she married Erich Stern, a Milwaukee lawyer and politician, with whom she began taking annual trips to Europe. At first attracted to Fauvism and Cubism, Stern eventually became an fervent champion of completely abstract or non-objective art and developed close friendships with Laszlo Moholy-Nagy of the New Chicago Bauhaus, William Valentiner of the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Hilla Rebay, director of the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum). Stern also became an avid writer and lecturer on modern art, as well as a philanthropist instrumental in the development of the Haggerty Museum at Marquette University.

Combining geometric and biomorphic abstraction in her own works, Stern made assemblage constructions of wood, plastic, cork, glass, and metal comparable to Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus reliefs. Her découpage constructions, such as Martinique of 1950 (cat. 10), are among her most personal and original creations. They consist principally of pieces of fabric and thread cut, stitched, and glued together to create a lyrical composition of delicately floating forms, ultimately abstract in nature, but at times suggesting humorous, primordial creatures.

Howard Thomas (1889–1971) studied at The Ohio State University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. After graduating he moved to Milwaukee, where he supported himself as an artist and a teacher. Although a painter of American scene subjects from the beginning of his career until the mid-1940s, he imbued his works with modernist tendencies. During the 1930s he began combining modernist compositional structures with highly imaginative, symbolic elements in paintings filled with a disquieting sense of mystery and foreboding. Jones Island, a watercolor of 1935 (cat. 56), depicts an aban- doned boat that has apparently run aground, yet rests on a strange form with a round black eye, suggesting a bizarre fishing lure, or perhaps a whale that has swallowed the hapless vessel. Under the influence of his friend, painter Carl Holty, Thomas abandoned this type of Magic Realism in the 1950s in favor of greater abstraction.

A lifelong resident of Wisconsin, Santos Zingale (1908–1999) grew up on the East Side of Milwaukee. From 1927 to 1931, he attended the Milwaukee State Teachers College (now the University of Wisconsin—Milwaukee), where he studied under Gustav Moeller, Howard Thomas, Robert von Neumann and Elsa Ulbricht. Focused on social and urban subjects, Zingale was labeled a radical artist by the press in 1935 as a result of saying that “art must help the development of human consciousness and improve social order.”35 He was also active in various art organizations, including the Wisconsin Painters and Sculptors and the Wisconsin Artists Federation. From 1933 to 1934, he painted large-scale murals under the auspices of the Public Works of Art Project. He also worked for the Wisconsin Art Project from 1936 to 1942. In 1943 he was awarded a masters degree for Democracy in Education, a mural installed at the University of Wisconsin’s Madison School of Education. After serving in the U.S. Navy from 1944

25 to 1946, during which he produced sketches of life abroad the U.S.S. Bremerton, Zingale served as Emeritus Professor of Art at the University of Wisconsin at Madison until he retired in 1978.

Zingale’s painting Farm Near Holy Hill of 1936 (cat. 51) seems to honor the agricultural heritage of Wisconsin at a time when the Depression was destroying families through the country. Despite the apparent “realism” of this quintessential American scene subject, the buildings and landscape are actually rendered in a modernist language of expressively distorted form and space. There is something indescribably frightening about the way the buildings lurch forward on the right and the landscape heaves upward on the left, as if convulsing with horror and sorrow. Overtones of a disturbing, supernatural presence also invade the White Station of 1948 (cat. 28). Behind an ominously dark sky, moonlight reflects off seemingly wet pavement and four, red, gas pumps suggest figures with drawn pistols, like gangsters menacingly guarding the street corner. The brilliant flash of light behind the building in the upper right illuminates the background with a strange, unnatural clarity, as if coming from an unseen burst of lightning. Such unnerving dream imagery that undermines our confidence in the rational world of banal, everyday experience is commonly associated with the Magic Realist movement in American art.

MINNESOTA

Modernism developed later and more sporadically in Minnesota than it did in Ohio or Illinois. Minnesota entered the union as the 32nd state in 1858. The state’s largest cities, Minneapolis and St. Paul, grew along the banks of the upper Mississippi River near Fort Snelling, established in 1819, and Saint Anthony Falls, the only natural waterfall on the Mississippi. The falls provided waterpower for early saw and flour mills, eventually transforming the state into the world’s leading producer of flour to companies such as Pillsbury and General Mills. Railroads connected Minneapolis to the East in the 1860s, and beginning in the 1880s, iron ore mined in the northeast and shipped through Duluth to the Great Lakes provided another source of economic growth. Fed by immigrants from Europe and America, the state’s population grew from slightly over 6,000 people in 1850 to over 1,700,000 in 1900.

Minnesota’s earliest artists arrived in the 1820s and 1830s as pioneer explorers. On a visit in 1835–36, George Catlin (1796–1872) produced oil paintings of the river ways, landscape, and Native Americans. Over the next few decades prominent sites, such as Fort Snelling and Minnehaha Falls, were painted by Seth Eastman (1808–1875), Eastman Johnson (1824–1906), Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), John Kensett (1816–1872), and Robert Duncanson (1817–1872). A more permanent artistic community began to form around the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts, established in 1883, and the Minneapolis School of Art, founded in 1886 under the directorship of Stephen Douglas Volk (1856–1935), later succeeded by Robert Koehler (1850–1917).36 The Society began organizing exhibitions in 1889, opened a new neoclassical building designed by McKim, Mead, and White in 1915, and later renamed itself the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

At the turn of the century Minnesota’s most prominent artists, such as Volk and Koehler, painted in styles that mixed realism with loose brushwork and occasional bright colors influenced by Impressionism. Many artists from the state pursued additional training in Chicago, New York, Munich, and Paris. Volk studied in Italy and France, and for a time under Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris, where he exhibited at the Salon of 1878.37 Koehler was born in Germany and studied in Milwaukee, New York,

26 and Munich before coming to Minnesota in 1893 to become director of the Minneapolis Society of Fine Arts.38 His, painterly style and concern for contemporary social issues has prompted comparisons with the Ash Can artists of New York.39

Neither Charles Biederman (1906–2004) nor Alexander Corazzo (1908–1971), two of Minnesota’s most prominent modernists, were born in the state, and Corazzo was active there only sporadically. Biederman grew up in Cleveland and studied drawing and watercolor painting at the Cleveland School of Art (today the Institute of Art). After working as an apprentice in a local advertising studio, he moved to Chicago in 1926 and spent the next three years studying at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Biederman left Chicago in 1934 and moved to New York, where he began making abstract reliefs and collage constructions. For several years he associated with George L.K. Morris, Albert Gallatin, and other artists experimenting with non-objective styles influenced by Cubism and Neo-Plasticism. In the fall of 1936, Biederman traveled to Paris, where he became friendly with Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró, Constantin Brancusi, and other members of the Abstract-Création group. Biederman returned to New York in June 1937, moved to Chicago in 1941, and settled in Red Wing, Minnesota, in 1942, where he established himself as one of the state’s most prominent artists. He continued producing abstract works until his death in 2004.

Biederman’s early discovery of Paul Cézanne and the principals of Post-Impressionist compositional structure are evident in Landscape, Chicago of 1929 (cat. 31). Houses and trees are rendered as radically simplified, compact, geometric shapes that move vertically up the picture surface rather than back into deep space. The walls and roofs of the buildings in the lower center read almost as abstract blocks of red and orange lying on top of one another and pressed tight against the picture surface, making them appear powerfully close to the viewer. The trees, on the other hand, are interpreted as circular shapes that spiral upward in alternating planes of warm and cool color, creating rhythmic movements through the “push-pull” effect of complementary color contrast. Smoke and clouds are similarly transformed into intersecting planes of white and gray that echo the rhythmic movements of abstract form and color in the landscape below.

Originality, experimentation, and intellectual inquiry replaced older values.

“ Only three years after painting this Cézannesque landscape, Biederman demonstrated a new mastery of modernist design in his Cubist Self-Portrait of 1932 (cat. 19). The reductive, abstract figure indicates how quickly he learned from Picasso and Braque to ignore unnecessary details and interpret form in the radically simplified language of Cubist geometric construction. Of particular interest is Biederman’s method of integrating” the figure with surrounding space by leaving contours open in places and allowing gray space to invade the body. Biederman was not merely borrowing Cubism elements, but skillfully organizing his abstract shapes into a serpentine movement that spirals upward from the yellow arching shapes in the jacket toward the top of the forehead, producing an elegant composition of fully integrated, abstract form.

Born in Lyon, France, in 1908, Alexander Corazzo (1908–1971) studied music from age ten to sixteen. At age nineteen he moved to the United States and enrolled in the St. Paul School of Art. By 1934 he was painting fully abstract or non-objective compositions

27 and working for the Minnesota branch of the Works Progress Administration.40 In 1935 he became one of only three America artists invited to join the Abstract-Création group in Paris, although the exact details of his association with this seminal organization in the history of avant-garde art remain murky.41 In 1937 Corazzo studied at the New Bauhaus in Chicago, an advanced design school established by Laszlo Mohogy-Nagy. The following year Corazzo went to New York and joined the Abstract American Artists, a group founded to support the development of experimental, non-objective art and which looked for inspiration to the Neo-Plasticism of Piet Mondrian. Corazzo’s painting, Untitled of 1929 (cat. 18), represents a sophisticated use of synthetic Cubism to depict the head of a figure wearing a hat. The human form has been reduced to radically fragmented, flattened, geometric shapes that are woven together into a masterful composition of merging, intersecting planes. Pronounced areas of impastoed paint to the left and right, and just below the chin, along with the scraped paint in the brown hat enliven the surface with areas of textural variety.

MISSOURI

Modernism in Missouri first developed in the state’s two cultural centers, St. Louis and Kansas City. French Canadians founded St. Louis in 1764 at the confluence of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. In 1804, a year after the United States acquired the region through the Louisiana Purchase, Louis and Clark began their exploration of the West from St. Louis. With the arrival of the first steamboats in 1817, St. Louis developed into a major transportation and trading center. Swelling immigration pushed the state’s population from 66,000 in 1820 to over 1,300,000 in 1900, the year St. Louis emerged as the nation’s fourth most populous city.

Upon arriving in St. Louis in 1812, portrait and landscape painter François-Marie Guyol de Guiran (active in America 1812–1828) established himself as the city’s first resident artist.42 Like most of his colleagues, he would live in the city for several years, then move on. Among the most prominent artists to spend time in St. Louis during the early to mid-nineteenth century were George Catlin (1796–1872), Karl Bodmer (1809–1893), Alfred Jacob Miller (1810–1874), and Charles Widmar (1828–1862). George Caleb Bingham (1811–1879), who lived at various times in St. Louis and Kansas City, began his career as a traveling portrait painter in 1833 and became one of Missouri’s first resident artists to establish a national reputation. This first generation was principally concerned with producing descriptive, picturesque renderings of life on the frontier. Among their favorite subjects were notable sites, such as views of St. Louis from the river, the daily life and customs of Native Americans and frontiersmen, and distinctive aspects of the regional landscape.

Communal art activity developed first in St. Louis and several decades later in Kansas City. Traveling exhibitions began to appear in St. Louis as early as 1819. Provisional museums were established in the city as early as the 1830s, the Western Academy of Art in 1858, and several design schools in the 1870s.43 The city’s most venerable art institution, the St. Louis Art Museum, was founded in 1879 as the St. Louis School and Museum of Fine Arts. The emergence of an organized art community in Kansas City, first settled in the 1830s, was marked by establishment of the annual Kansas City Industrial Exposition in 1871, a sketch club in 1885, the Western Gallery of Art sponsored by William Rockhill Nelson in 1897, and the Fine Arts Institute (later renamed the Kansas City Art Institute) in 1907.44

28 Born to a family of German-Jewish immigrants in St. Louis, Albert Bloch (1882–1961) was arguably Missouri’s most important modernist painter of the early twentieth century. After studying at the St. Louis School of Fine Arts from 1898 to 1900, he found employment producing drawings and political cartoons for The St. Louis Mirror, a local newspaper. In 1908 he left for Europe and, after brief visits to England and France, settled in Germany. While abroad he maintained an ongoing relationship with the art community in St. Louis by serving as a foreign correspondent for The Mirror, an outlet for publishing his drawings and articles about cultural events in Europe. In 1911 Bloch attended the first exhibition of the Blue Rider group in Munich and became close friends with Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. During this period, Bloch developed a style of expressively distorted form and intense, arbitrary color in the manner of his German colleagues. He also became a regular contributor to exhibitions of the German Expressionists in Munich and the Sturm group in Berlin. In 1915 twenty-five of his paintings were displayed in a one-man exhibition devoted to his recent work at the Art Institution of Chicago and the City Art Museum in St. Louis. Bloch returned to St. Louis in 1919. After teaching for a year at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts in 1921, he moved back to St. Louis. He served on the faculty of the University of Kansas in Lawrence from 1923 to 1947, and during that period his paintings were featured in several solo exhibitions in Kansas City, Lawrence, New York, and Chicago.

Bloch apparently painted The Veranda (cat. 35) during a brief visit to Ascona, Switzerland, in 1920, his final trip to Europe. The subject has been interpreted as depicting Bloch seated with folded arms on the right side of a café table opposite his friend Gordon McCouch, who raises one arm with an animated gesture.45 The woman in the lower right and the man seen from behind looking at the lake and the stars suggest fantasy figures lost in an idealized dream world, as if symbolic conduits to a transcendent realm of spiritual experience. Compared with the strident style of Bloch’s paintings of 1911–14, a gentler spirit pervades Veranda. Forms are delicately modeled with strokes of harmonious, luminous color, generating a soothing, decorative effect that marks a considerable shift from the harsh violence of Bloch’s pre-war expressionist paintings. The overall feeling of nostalgic reverie in The Veranda suggests a yearning for a more innocent time, perhaps inspired by memories of colleagues, such as Franz Marc, who lost their lives in the Great War.

Widely known as a prominent regionalist and politically engaged artist, Joe Jones (1909–1963) was born in a poor section of St. Louis, the son of a house painter. Although largely self-taught, he began receiving awards for his paintings at the age of twenty-one and became close friends with Thomas Hart Benton. In 1934 Jones began working for the Public Works of Art Project and painted five murals for post offices in Missouri, Kansas, and Arkansas. While he acquired a national reputation for his images of Midwestern farmers working in wheat fields, Jones also depicted urban scenes, factories, labor strikes, and farm protesters. During the early 1930s he painted a series of American scene subjects that engaged modernist issues. The hard, geometric forms in Industrial Landscape: St. Louis of 1932 (cat. 32), with its upwardly tilted planes in the foreground, introduces an element of modernist abstraction into a deceptively “realist” depiction of an industrial site on the outskirts of the city. The factory almost assumes the character of a frightening, robotic machine moving into the landscape and threatening the tranquility of life in the countryside. Such a symbolic interpretation may not seem so far fetched in light of the artist’s strong political leanings toward the extreme left. Jones’s radical political views became so controversial that in 1937 he left Missouri permanently and settled in New York.

29 It may seem odd to include Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975), known as a fervent anti-modernist, in this exhibition. However, during his early years Benton was a dedicated modernist who associated with circles of avant-garde artists in New York and Paris, the influence of which lingered in his later American scene and regionalist paintings, and which he passed on to his students, such as the Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock. In fact, the distorted and energetic forms in Benton’s signature “regionalist” paintings—from his simplified and flattened shapes, to the organization of elements around a central vortex with abstract rhythms pulsating in counterbalanced movements—all derive from his early experiences with avant-garde art. Ultimately, his American scene and regionalist paintings represent a merging of realist and modernist styles.

Born in Neosho, Missouri, Benton began drawing at an early age and found work as a cartoonist. In 1907, at age eighteen, he enrolled in the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Two years later, he left for Europe and spent three years studying at the Académie Julian and the Académie Collarossi in Paris. While abroad he developed a close relationship with the American Synchromist Stanton MacDonald-Wright and experimented with a series of avant-garde styles influenced by Cubism and Fauvism. Benton returned to America in 1913, settled in New York, and continued exploring the abstract color principles of Synchromism. The radically simplified, geometric forms and intensely colored planes in Constructivist Still Life of 1917–18 (cat. 4) demonstrate how close Benton came to pure abstraction. Only the slightest references to a piece of sliced fruit, set in bowl on a table, covered by a cloth, can be discerned in this radically reductive composition, in which powerful forms extend to every edge of the composition to eliminate any contextual environment or sentimental narrative.

Although Benton turned increasingly to American scene subjects in the 1920s, he continued to distort, flatten, and reorganize forms and space to create dynamic compositions based on modernist structural principles. He began to acquire a national reputation only after painting his America Today murals of 1930–31 for the New School for Social Research. Appearing on the cover of Time magazine in 1934 as part of an article that proclaimed him one of the leaders of the new American scene movement in American art, Benton assumed a new mantle as the nation’s preeminent anti-modernist. He returned to Missouri the following year and taught at the Kansas City Art Institute until dismissed in 1941 after making disparaging remarks about homosexuals dominating the art world and describing the average museum as “a graveyard run by a pretty boy with delicate wrists and a swing in his gait.” Praised by Harry Truman as the “best damn painter in America,” Benton continued working in Kansas City until his death in 1975. He was not the last surviving member of this pioneering generation of modernists in the Midwest, however, as August Biehle remained active until his death in 1975, William Grauer until 1985, and Charles Biederman until 2004.

1 The term Fauvism, literally meaning “wild beasts,” was first used in 1905 by the critic Louis Vauxalles to dis- parage the paintings of Matisse and his colleagues, who exhibited together that year in a single room at the Salon d’Automne in Paris.

2 William H. Gerdts, Art Across America: Two Centuries of Regional Painting, 1710–1920, 3 vols. (New York: Abbeville Press, 1990), II:175. Gerdts groups Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin together in a chapter titled “The Near Midwest.” Considering the close ties between Minneapolis and Chicago, the authors of this catalogue find it difficult to exclude Minnesota; so we have added that state and two others directly to the south, Iowa and Missouri, to our study of modernism in the Midwest.

30 3 Detroit, the dominant art center in Michigan, has not been included because modernism did not develop there in the early twentieth century with the same energy as in Cleveland or Chicago. As Gerdts observed, even Impressionism was not widely practiced in Detroit. (See Gerdts, II:247.) Although there were thriving, distin- guished art communities in Indiana and Iowa, those states have been excluded from this study for the same reason as Michigan.

4 The term Post-Impressionism was coined in 1910 by British art critic Roger Fry to describe artists, such as Paul Cézanne and Vincent van Gogh, whose styles went beyond Impressionism. Fry used the term for the title of his exhibition Manet and the Post-Impressionists, held at the Grafton Galleries in London in 1910–11. Artists who broke away from established academies and established their own organizations and independent exhibi- tions often labeled themselves “secessionists.”

5 Abraham A. Davidson writes, “The beginnings of early American modernist painting may be set generally at about 1910. That was the year of Arthur G. Dove’s first nonobjective paintings, of Max Weber’s nudes based on Picasso’s Iberian figures, and of Morgan Russell’s first still lifes done in the manner of Cézanne.” Dove and Weber were members of the Stieglitz Circle, Russell lived in Paris from 1908 or 1909 to 1946, but did exhibit in the Armory Show. See, Early American Modernist Painting 1910–1935 (New York: Harper and Row, 1981), 1-2.

6 Gerdts, II:179.

7 James M. Keny, Triumph of Color and Light: Ohio Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, exh. cat. (Columbus, Ohio: Columbus Museum of Art, 1994). 18.

8 Frederick Gottwald (1858-1941), the most prominent teacher at the Cleveland School of Art, trained in Cleveland and Munich, and painted in a style that might be called academic Impressionism. Archibald Willard (1836-1918), founder of the Cleveland Art Club (est. 1876) and painter of The Spirit of ’76, originally titled Yankee Doodle, was perhaps the city’s most famous artist of the period.

9 Henry Keller and John MacCleod, “The Physiology of Color Vision in Modern Art,” Smithsonian Report (1913), 723-39.

10 Zorach, originally named Zorach Samovich, was born in Euberick, Lithuania. Upon immigrating with his family to Ohio at age thirteen, he adopted the name William Finkelstein. From 1903 to 1906, he studied in Henry Keller’s evening classes at the Cleveland School of Art. In April 1912, the Taylor Gallery in Cleveland mounted Zorach’s first one-man exhibition, which consisted largely of Fauvist paintings. Upon moving to New York in late 1912, he changed his name to William Zorach. For the rest of the decade, he continued to partici- pate in modernist exhibitions and other activities in Cleveland, even returning briefly in 1919 to live in the city and associate with Sommer. Zorach began making sculptures in 1917 and abandoned oil painting entirely in 1922.

11 William Zorach to Henry Francis, 1 June 1950. William Sommer Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

12 Cited in Hunter Ingalls, “The Several Dimensions of William Sommer,” Ph.d. Dissertation, Columbia University, New York, 1970, 24.

13 Ibid., 9.

14 Quoted in John Unterecker, Voyager (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1969), 195.

15 Philip Kaplan, “Look for the Miracle,” undated typed manuscript, William Sommer Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

16 She also traveled extensively in the United States, spending several summers in Gloucester, Provincetown, and Santa Fe, and visited Morocco, Egypt, and Guatemala.

17 German writer Franz Roh coined the term “Magic Realism” to describe the paintings of artists associated with Neuesachlichkeit (New Objectivity) movement, which although mimetically realistic in style, evoke feelings of a disturbingly strange and mysterious world hidden beneath the mundane reality. In the 1930s and 1940s, art historians and critics began applying this term to the work of certain American artists, including Paul Cadmus, Ivan Albright, and George Tooker. Some critics viewed Magic Realism as an American form of Surrealism, although Magic Realism was never a cohesive movement with a leader or defining doctrine, and its precise meaning remains open to speculation and dispute.

18 Information in this essay about Kutchin relies heavily upon the pioneering study of the artist’s life and work published in Nannette V. Maciejunes, Personal Mythologies: Columbus Painter Lucius Kutchin, 1901–1936, exh. cat., (Columbus, Ohio: Columbus Museum of Art, 1988).

19 Ibid., 28.

20 Gerdts, II: 281

21 Ibid.

22 Wendy Greenhouse, “Introduction,” Chicago Modern, 1993–1945: Pursuit of the New, exh. cat. (Chicago: Terra Museum of American Art, 2004), 19.

31 23 Ibid., 18.

24 Henry Adams, Manierre Dawson: American Pioneer of Abstract Art (New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries, 1999), 18.

25 Elizabeth Kennedy, Chicago Modern 1893–1945: Pursuit of the New, exh. cat. (Terra Museum of American Art, 2004),106.

26 Ibid., 40–41.

27 Dawson once indicated that similar forms in his painting Prognostic might have been inspired by subconscious associations with such objects. See Susan S. Weininger, “Maniere Dawson,” in Chicago Modern, 1993–1945: Pursuit of the New, exh. cat. (Chicago: Terra Museum of American Art, 2004), 106.

28 Courtney Graham Donnell, Ivan Albright (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1997), 2.

29 Handwritten note in the Abercrombie papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

30 Mareen McKenna, Julia Thecla, (Springfield: Illinois State Museum, 1984), 5.

31 Kennedy, 115.

32 Gerdts, II: 329.

33 Ibid., 335.

34 Michael Dannoff, Carl Holty: The World Seen & Sensed, exh. cat. (Milwaukee Art Museum, 1981), 8.

35 Archives, Museum of Wisconsin Art, West Bend, Wisconsin.

36 For general information about the history of the arts in Minnesota, see Rena Neumann Coen, Painting and Sculpture in Minnesota, 1820–1914 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1976); Michael Conforti, “Introduction: Art and Life on the Upper Mississippi 1890–1915," in Minnesota 1900: Art and Life on the Upper Mississippi, 1890–1915 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994); and Sue Canterbury, “Minnesota Painters,” in Noble Dreams & Simple Pleasures: American Masterworks from Minnesota Collections, exh. cat. (Minneapolis: Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2009).

37 Coen, 108.

38 Harold L. Van Doren, “Koehler, Robert,” Dictionary of American Biography, (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, ), V, part 2, 484-485, and Colles Baxter Larkin, “Koehler, Robert,” American National Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 12:857-858.

39 Ibid., 109-110.

40 Works by Corazzo were included in Abstract Painting in Minnesota: Selected Works 1930 to the Present, an exhibition organized by Thomas Barry and shown at the Rochester Art Center and the Minnesota Museum of American Art in 2005, as well as For the People, By the People: New Deal Art at the Weisman, an exhibition organized by Diane Mullin for the Frederick H. Weisman Art Museum of the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, in 2008.

41 According to the artist’s biography posted on the website AskArt, this information came from the artist’s personal archives and interviews with his wife. Also see Gerome Kamrowski, Alexander Corazzo/LeRoy Turner, American Abstraction-Creation, exh. cat. (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan School of Art, 1976).

42 Gerdts, III:29.

43 Ibid., 47.

44 Ibid., 62-63. In 1831, Mormons established a settlement at Independence, Missouri, today part of the Kansas City metropolitan area, but they were driven out by mobs in 1833. Kansas City was incorporated in 1853.

45 Henry Adams, Albert Bloch: The American Blue Rider (Munich: Prestel, 1997), 43.

46 “Art: Benton Hates Museums,” TIME, vol. 37, no. 15 (April 14, 1941), reprinted on www.time.com.

47 David McCullough, Truman (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 1145.

32 Ideal Form: Abstraction

Abstraction was one of the principal objectives of modernist art. Abstraction could mean exaggerating, distorting, and reorganizing views of the natural world, or it could involve creating entirely invented, “non-objective” art. Artists from several Midwestern cities began exploring abstraction as early as 1910–13, and the tendency persisted even during the years after World War I, when American scene realism eclipsed avant-garde modernism as the dominant movement in the visual arts. Manierre Dawson of Chicago was among the first painters to explore completely abstract, non-objective art. Inspired by his architectural training and mathematics, Dawson’s paintings of 1910–1920 present an ideal world of abstract forms and colors arranged in dynamic, rhythmic patterns and united through intersecting planes of form and space. Prior to becoming a celebrated American scene artist, Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri spent several years painting in a Synchromist style that merged Cubist formal construction with pure, arbitrary color derived from French Fauvism. William Sommer and August Biehle of Cleveland began using abstract color and form to interpret local subjects as early as 1910–1912, and continued to do so into the 1940s and 1950s. A leading advocate for avant-garde art in America, Carl Holty from Milwaukee painted both non-objective compositions and abstracted figures floating in luminous fields of color. Lucia Stern of Wisconsin ardently promoted non-objective art through her paintings, writings, and decoupage constructions of glued and stitched fabric. Paul Travis and William Grauer of Ohio, as well as Charles Biederman and Alexander Corazzo of Illinois and Minnesota, are among the other artists in this exhibition who explored abstraction.

33 CATALOG 1: FIGURE 1: Manierre Dawson (Chicago) Manierre Dawson (Chicago) Differential Complex Oil on board | 54.61 cm x 44.45 cm | 1910 Oil on board | 21" x 17" | 1910

CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART MR. AND MRS. WILLIAM H. MARLATT FUND 2001.123 34 CATALOG 2: Manierre Dawson (Chicago) Hercules I Oil on canvas | 36" x 28" | 1913

COLLECTION OF THE ILLINOIS STATE MUSEUM GIFT OF DR. LEWIS J. OBI; FRANK J. MCKEOWN, JR; AND LEFFERTS MABIE

35 CATALOG 3: Manierre Dawson (Chicago) Desert Oil on masonite | 22" x 28" | 1920

COLLECTION OF THE ILLINOIS STATE MUSEUM GIFT OF DR. LEWIS J. OBI; FRANK J. MCKEOWN, JR; AND LEFFERTS MABIE

36 CATALOG 4: Thomas Hart Benton (Kansas City) Constructivist Still Life Oil on paper | 17.5" x 13.625" | 1917–18

COLUMBUS MUSEUM OF ART, OHIO GIFT OF CARL A. MAGNUSON 1963.006

37 CATALOG 5: August Biehle (Cleveland) Changing Seasons Oil on board | 32.5" x 23.5" | 1935

LISA BIEHLE FILES AND BRUCE EDWARD FILES

38 CATALOG 6: William Sommer (Cleveland/Akron) Still Life of Fruit and Flowers Ink and watercolor | 8.325" x 5.25" | nd

MASSILLON MUSEUM COLLECTION GIFT OF ALBERT E. HISE 76.9.16 39 CATALOG 7: Paul Travis (Cleveland) Chartres Cathedral Watercolor on paper | 26" x 20" | 1947

COLLECTION OF THE AKRON ART MUSEUM GIFT OF THE ESTATE OF DOROTHY VAN SICKLE

40 CATALOG 8: Carl Holty (Milwaukee) Pink Lady Oil on masonite | 18" x 14" | 1948

SPANIERMAN GALLERY, LLC, NEW YORK

41 CATALOG 9: Carl Holty (Milwaukee) Europa Oil on canvas | 18" x 14" | 1948

SPANIERMAN GALLERY, LLC, NEW YORK

42 CATALOG 10: Lucia Stern (Milwaukee) Martinique Stitchery and decoupage | 24.5" x 34.75" | c. 1950

GIFT OF THE MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUM AND PATRICK AND BEATRICE HAGGERTY MUSEUM OF ART MUSEUM OF WISCONSIN ART COLLECTION 1988.012

43 The Human Condition: Portraits

Perhaps because we are fascinated by ourselves, the traditional genre of portraiture—or the representation of specific individuals—remained one of the principal concerns of modernists. The invention of photography as an inexpensive means of recording the human image, coupled with a reaction against portraiture’s conventional role as a commercial enterprise in which artistic control is often seceded to the desires of the patron, challenged modern artists to explore new approaches to the genre. They responded in two opposing directions: either by focusing on more personal, intimate, psychologically-penetrating interpretations of close friends and colleagues, or by depersonalizing the sitter through a process of formal abstraction. A third way involved employing intensified color and abstract formal structures to heighten the emotional impact of the image and infuse it with symbolic meaning. This path offered a revitalized means of interpreting the human condition and produced highly personal portraits as antidotes to the dehumanizing effects of the modern industrial age. The paintings in this section demonstrate how modernists in the Midwest approached portraiture through a broad array of styles. Influenced by Post- Impressionism and Fauvism, William Sommer of Cleveland employed reductive form and complementary contrasts of abstract color in his poignant portraits of close friends and family members. Ivan Le Lorraine Albright of Chicago developed an original, hyperrealist technique as a metaphor for the inevitable decay of life and to suggest the presence of a mysterious world hidden beneath outward appearances. Todros Geller of Chicago, Lucius Kutchin of Columbus, and Raphael Gleitsmann of Akron mixed American scene realism with modernist color and form to create psychologically penetrating portraits of women. Clara Deike of Cleveland, Alexander Corazzo of Chicago and Minneapolis, and Charles Biederman of Chicago and Red Wing, Minnesota, interpreted figures through more depersonalized, formalist styles, emphasizing the geometric, flattened, intersecting planes of Cubism.

44 CATALOG 11: William Sommer (Cleveland/Akron) Ray in a Red Collar Oil on canvas | 26" x 20" | 1914

COLUMBUS MUSEUM OF ART, OHIO GIFT OF MR. AND MRS. JOSEPH M. ERDELAC 1995.016

45 CATALOG 12: Gregory Orloff (Chicago) Vera Mirova Oil on canvas | 40" x 34" | 1927

PRIVATE COLLECTION COURTESY RICHARD NORTON GALLERY, CHICAGO

46 CATALOG 13: Ivan Albright (Chicago) There Were No Flowers Tonight Oil on canvas | 48.3125" x 30.25" | 1929

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON GIFT OF ROBERT H. AND CLARICE SMITH 1972.7.1

47 CATALOG 14: Todros Geller (Chicago) Untitled Oil on canvas | 19.325" x 15.5" | 1929

COLLECTION OF CLIFFORD LAW OFFICES, CHICAGO COURTESY RICHARD NORTON GALLERY, CHICAGO

48 CATALOG 15: Lucius Kutchin (Columbus) Girl in Green Oil on panel | 35.875" x 28" | c. 1930

COLUMBUS MUSEUM OF ART, OHIO GIFT OF MISS STELLA MILBURN 1979.084

49 CATALOG 16: Raphael Gleitsmann (Akron) The Brown Gloves Oil on fiberboard | 26" x 22" | c. 1932

COLLECTION OF THE AKRON ART MUSEUM GIFT OF MRS. LOUISE FAYSASH

50 CATALOG 17: Clara Deike (Cleveland) Munich Self-Portrait Oil on paper | 23.5" x 18.5" | 1922

DANIEL BUSH

51 CATALOG 18: Alexander Corazzo (Minneapolis/Chicago) Untitled Oil on canvas | 40" x 30" | 1929

TREGONING & COMPANY, CLEVELAND

52 CATALOG 19: Charles Biederman (Cleveland/Chicago/Minneapolis) Cubist Self-Portrait, Chicago Oil on canvas | 39.125" x 24.375" | January 1932

LENT BY THE FREDERICK R. WEISMAN ART MUSEUM, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, MINNEAPOLIS BIEDERMAN ARCHIVE, GIFT OF CHARLES J. BIEDERMAN

53 Urban and Industrial Life

During the decades after the Civil War, cities throughout the Midwest industrialized and grew at an astonishing pace. Chicago, St. Louis, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis emerged as major transportation and manufacturing centers. Steel, oil, iron ore, grain, flour, and automobile production in these cities contributed significantly to the nation’s emergence as the world’s most advanced industrial nation. Expanding industries attracted immigrants from around the world, producing explosive population growth and rapid urbanization. From 1870 to 1920 the population of Chicago increased tenfold, from 298,000 to 2.7 million people. During the same period Cleveland grew from 92,000 to 790,000 inhabitants, St. Louis from 310,000 to 773,000, Milwaukee from 71,000 to 457,000, and Minneapolis from 13,000 to 380,000. By 1920 over half of all Americans were living in cities, a dramatic change from early days of the republic when over 80% of the population lived in rural areas. Midwestern artists responded to the forces of urbanization and industrialization that were transforming society by producing images that both celebrated and raised troubling doubts about the changing character of American cities. Emotive color and expressive distortions of form in the paintings of Charles Burchfield, Emil Armin, Francis Chapin, and Harold Noecker suggest a troubled reaction to the dehumanizing effects of life in the impersonal modern city. The high-keyed color and energetic brushwork in the paintings by Albert Krehbiel, by contrast, seem to celebrate the city as an agent of dynamic activity and progress. A sense of mystery and loneliness pervades the urban views of Romolo Roberti and Santos Zingale. A more neutral reaction appears in the paintings of Charles Biederman, in which the hard, geometric shapes of buildings and industrial machinery are exploited for their formal qualities. Karl Gasslander interpreted the trees in an industrial landscape as humorous, humanoid mechanical creatures, while Arthur Osver depicted an industrial ventilator as if it were a frightening god ruling over the city and demanding sacrificial victims.

54 CATALOG 20: Charles Burchfield (Cleveland/Salem/Buffalo) Noon Watercolor and gouache | 15.5" x 13.5" | 1917

COURTESY OF DC MOORE GALLERY, NEW YORK

55 CATALOG 21: Albert H. Krehbiel (Chicago) Michigan Avenue Bridge Oil on canvas | 27" x 34" | c. 1920

ESTATE OF THE ARTIST COURTESY RICHARD NORTON GALLERY, CHICAGO

56 CATALOG 22: Albert H. Krehbiel (Chicago) Evening Rush Hour in the Chicago Loop Oil on board | 12" x 14" | 1926

ESTATE OF THE ARTIST COURTESY RICHARD NORTON GALLERY, CHICAGO

57 CATALOG 23: Emil Armin (Chicago) The Gateway Oil on canvas | 16" x 20" | 1927

GIFT OF HERMAN F. AND HELEN P. JOHNSON BRAUER MUSEUM OF ART, 2005.14, VALPARAISO UNIVERSITY

58 CATALOG 24: Francis Chapin (Chicago) By the El Tracks Oil on canvas | 34" x 39" | c. 1935

ESTATE OF THE ARTIST COURTESY RICHARD NORTON GALLERY, CHICAGO

59 CATALOG 25: Rowena Fry (Chicago) The Parking Lot Watercolor on paper | 23.5" x 29.5" | c. 1940

COLLECTION OF THE ILLINOIS STATE MUSEUM, COURTESY OF THE FINE ARTS PROGRAM PUBLIC BUILDINGS SERVICE, U.S. GENERAL SERVICES ADMINISTRATION COMMISSIONED THROUGH THE NEW DEAL ART PROJECTS

60 CATALOG 26: Romolo Roberti (Chicago) Backyard Alley Scene Chicago Oil on canvas board | 20" x 14" | 1932

CHARLES S. HAYES FAMILY

61 CATALOG 27: Romolo Roberti (Chicago) Roofs Oil on canvas | 34" x 30" | 1934

PERMANENT COLLECTION WESTERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY MACOMB, ILLINOIS

62 CATALOG 28: Santos Zingale (Milwaukee) White Station Oil on masonite panel | 23.25" x 30.875" | 1948

MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUM GIFT OF GIMBEL BROS., MILWAUKEE

63 CATALOG 29: August F. Biehle (Cleveland) Cleveland West Side, Hillside Houses Oil on board | 28" x 39.5" | c. 1914–17

FREDERICK BIEHLE AND ERIKA HINRICHS

64 CATALOG 30: Harold Noecker (Chicago) Angular Landscape (Division Street) Oil on canvas | 30" x 33" | c. 1944

COLLECTION OF JOHN AND SUSAN HORSEMAN

65 CATALOG 31: Charles Biederman (Cleveland/Chicago/Minneapolis) Landscape, Chicago Oil on canvas | 30" x 22" | July 16, 1929

LENT BY THE FREDERICK R. WEISMAN ART MUSEUM UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, MINNEAPOLIS BIEDERMAN ARCHIVE, GIFT OF CHARLES J. BIEDERMAN

66 CATALOG 32: Joe Jones (St. Louis) Industrial Landscape, Saint Louis, 1932 Oil on canvas | 20" x 28" | 1932

COLLECTION OF MICHAEL LAWLOR COURTESY RICHARD NORTON GALLERY, CHICAGO

67 CATALOG 33: Karl Gasslander (Chicago) Apple Tree Oil on canvas | 30" x 24" | 1935

MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR. PRIVATE COLLECTION COURTESY RICHARD NORTON GALLERY, CHICAGO

68 CATALOG 34: Arthur Osver (Chicago/St. Louis) Red Ventilator Oil on masonite | 29.5" x 24" | 1945

COLLECTION OF JOHN AND SUSAN HORSEMAN

69 The Social Order

The industrial revolution brought with it new social critiques and rising class consciousness. Karl Marx’s immensely influential Communist Manifesto of 1848 presented a trenchant analysis of the historical development of modern society, seen as the product of an enduring conflict between competing classes. Even popular novels, such as Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle of 1906 and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby of 1925, exposed vast economic disparities in American society. Rising class consciousness was strongly felt in the industrialized Midwest, a power base of the Progressive movement. To protect workers against the abuses of industrial capitalism, the American Federation of Labor was established in Columbus, Ohio, in 1886, and the Industrial Workers of the World in Chicago in 1905. Raw social tensions erupted in violent labor strikes, Chicago’s Haymarket Riot of 1886, and the assassination of President McKinley from Ohio by an anarchist in 1901. Modern artists in the Midwest were passionate chroniclers of the different social classes and professional occupations they observed both locally and while traveling abroad. Albert Bloch of St. Louis and William Grauer of Cleveland painted images of the profession they knew best: artists in social situations or at work in the studio. Julia Thecla of Chicago, labeled a Surrealist by some art historians, painted fantasy images of ballerinas preparing for performances, but often backstage, alone and isolated, suggesting analogies with her own life as an artist. Carl Hoeckner and Leon Garland of Chicago examined opposing social classes through a critical lens in The Yes Man and The Blacksmith. The precise meaning of Charles Biederman’s Chicago, April 1934, remains mysterious, but it may contain masked figures referring to the raging gangster warfare that occurred at the time involving John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson. Alice Schille of Columbus, William S. Schwartz of Chicago, and Chris Olson of Oshkosh painted positive, even joyous depictions of poor, working class laborers who toil together as anonymous contributors to a harmonious social order.

70 CATALOG 35: Albert Bloch (Chicago/St. Louis) Veranda Oil on paper | 18" x 21.125" | 1920

COLUMBUS MUSEUM OF ART, OHIO GIFT OF FERDINAND HOWALD 1931.108

71 CATALOG 36: William Grauer (Cleveland) Studio Interior Watercolor on paper | 22" x 30" | 1930

PRIVATE COLLECTION COURTESY OF TREGONING & COMPANY, CLEVELAND

72 CATALOG 37: Julia Thecla (Chicago) Mary in Blue Shoes Opaque watercolor, charcoal, graphite on board | 18" x 22" | 1939

COLLECTION OF THE ILLINOIS STATE MUSEUM

73 CATALOG 38: Carl Hoeckner (Chicago) The Yes Machine (The Master of Men) Oil on board | 29" x 39" | c. 1930

COLLECTION OF CLIFFORD LAW OFFICES, CHICAGO COURTESY RICHARD NORTON GALLERY, CHICAGO

74 CATALOG 39: Leon Garland (Chicago) The Blacksmith Oil on canvas | 29.25" x 35.25" | c. 1940

COLLECTION OF THE ILLINOIS STATE MUSEUM, COURTESY OF THE FINE ARTS PROGRAM PUBLIC BUILDINGS SERVICE, U.S. GENERAL SERVICES ADMINISTRATION COMMISSIONED THROUGH THE NEW DEAL ART PROJECTS

75 CATALOG 40: Alice Schille (Columbus) Coffee Workers Return Watercolor on paper | 19.75" x 24.75" | c. 1930–35

PRIVATE COLLECTION COURTESY OF KENY GALLERIES, COLUMBUS, OHIO

76 CATALOG 41: Gregory Orloff (Chicago) The Chicago World’s Fair Oil on canvas | 24.5" x 36" | 1933

COLLECTION OF SUSAN AND GARY GARRABRANDT COURTESY RICHARD NORTON GALLERY, CHICAGO

77 CATALOG 42: Charles Biederman (Cleveland/Chicago/Minneapolis) Untitled, Chicago Oil on canvas | 24.125" x 24.125" | April 1934

LENT BY THE FREDERICK R. WEISMAN ART MUSEUM, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, MINNEAPOLIS BIEDERMAN ARCHIVE, GIFT OF CHARLES J. BIEDERMAN

78 CATALOG 43: William S. Schwartz (Chicago) Dancing the Blues Away Oil on canvas | 40" x 50" | 1935

COLLECTION OF MICHAEL LAWLOR COURTESY RICHARD NORTON GALLERY, CHICAGO

79 Beyond the City

While some modernists in the Midwest celebrated America’s new urban centers, others sought refuge in rural life and nature. For many artists, the countryside offered a respite from dirty, overcrowded cities—places festering with disease, poverty, crime, and class conflict. Even during the early years of the twentieth century, American artists continued to admire the transcendentalist philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, with its emphasis on establishing a direct, spiritual relationship with nature. The puritanical view of cities as dens of vice and corruption remained deeply ingrained in the American psyche. The growing popularity of Socialism also encouraged artists to leave the cities and form egalitarian communities of creative individuals devoted to the pursuit of personal and artistic freedom. For this and other reasons, modernists in the Midwest contributed to the national trend of establishing artists’ colonies in small villages and coast communities as antidotes to the hectic pace of life and the feverish competition for material gain pervasive in the nation’s commercial centers. This reaction against the city was especially strong among Ohio modernists. In 1903, Henry Keller of Cleveland established his own summer school on family- owned farmland in Berlin Heights, Ohio, near Cedar Point on the shores of Lake Erie. Keller’s farm became the center of a colony of modernists who gathered in the area each summer until 1914 to experiment with Post-Impressionist compositional structures and Fauvist color. While studying at the Cleveland School of Art from 1912 to 1916, Charles Burchfield frequently went on painting excursions into the countryside accompanied by colleagues in a common quest for the quiet solitude of nature. William Sommer, who made his living as a commercial lithographer in Cleveland, turned an old, abandoned schoolhouse in the Brandywine Valley, just south of the city, into a studio he shared with other modernists seeking refuge from the stultifying race for material success in urban America. Midwestern modernists also sought escape from the city by painting on extended travels abroad and to other parts of the country. Alice Schille of Columbus, Ohio, went on painting trips nearly every year from 1902 to 1940. From 1902 to 1914 she worked in France, England, Germany, Holland, and Spain. When World War I made foreign travel difficult, she spent time painting in Gloucester, Santa Fe, and along the California coast. Schille resumed her painting trips to Europe during the 1920s and 1930s, but also worked in North Africa, Latin America, Turkey, and Egypt. Working in the isolation of nature or while traveling offered a liberating experience for artists. While Schille consistently painted in a style influenced by Post-Impressionism and sometimes experimented with Fauvist color, it appears that Santos Zingale of Milwaukee and Raphael Gleitsman of Akron modified their styles when painting scenes of rural America by adopting a more realist approach associated with the regionalist movement. William S. Schwartz of Chicago, Louis Kutchin of Columbus, and Paul Travis of Cleveland, on the other hand, interpreted rural subjects through the lens of a distinctly modernist sensibility that insisted on flattening, abstracting, and reorganizing the formal aspects of a composition to intensify its emotional impact. While the works they painted away from the city may have been anti-urban, they were certainly not anti-modern.

80 CATALOG 44: Henry Keller (Cleveland) At the Vermilion Lagoon Gouache | 14.5" x 17" | c. 1908

CLEVELAND ARTISTS FOUNDATION COLLECTION

81 CATALOG 45: Henry Keller (Cleveland) William Lee Farm, Berlin Heights Oil on board | 19.5" x 13" | c. 1915

CLEVELAND ARTISTS FOUNDATION COLLECTION

82 CATALOG 46: Charles Burchfield (Cleveland/Salem/Buffalo) Trees and Ravine Watercolor and gouache | 18" x 12.25" | 1917

COURTESY OF DC MOORE GALLERY, NEW YORK

83 CATALOG 47: William Sommer (Cleveland/Akron) Blue Dairy Cart Oil on board | 16.5" x 23.5" | 1917–18

COLLECTION OF JOHN AND SUSAN HORSEMAN COURTESY OF KENY GALLERIES, COLUMBUS, OHIO

84 CATALOG 48: Clara Deike (Cleveland) Landscape Oil on canvas | 25.5" x 23.5" | 1948

DANIEL BUSH

85 CATALOG 49: Alice Schille (Columbus) In a Mountain Village, Southern France Watercolor on paper | 20.75" x 18.25" | c. 1920–25

PRIVATE COLLECTION, COURTESY OF KENY GALLERIES, COLUMBUS, OHIO

86 CATALOG 50: Alice Schille (Columbus) Hilltown Watercolor on paper | 17.25" x 20.25" | c. 1920–25

PRIVATE COLLECTION, COURTESY OF KENY GALLERIES, COLUMBUS, OHIO

87 CATALOG 51: Santos Zingale (Milwaukee) Farm Near Holy Hill Watercolor on paper | 21.5" x 26.5" | 1936

MUSEUM OF WISCONSIN ART COLLECTION

88 CATALOG 52: Raphael Gleitsmann (Akron/Cleveland) Untitled Watercolor and graphite on paper | 20" x 24.5" | c. 1940

COLLECTION OF THE AKRON ART MUSEUM GIFT OF MRS. LOUISE FAYSASH

89 CATALOG 53: Raphael Gleitsmann (Akron/Cleveland) Untitled Watercolor and graphite on paper | 16.125" x 20.125" | c. 1935

COLLECTION OF THE AKRON ART MUSEUM GIFT OF MRS. LOUISE FAYSASH

90 CATALOG 54: William S. Schwartz (Chicago) Mountain Landscape Gouache on paper laid on board | 22" x 30" | 1940

SPANIERMAN GALLERY, LLC, NEW YORK

91 CATALOG 55: Lucius Kutchin (Columbus) Atalaya—Above Santa Fe Oil on canvas | 28" x 30" | 1936

COLUMBUS MUSEUM OF ART, OHIO

GIFT OF ANN MCELROY WRIGHT IN MEMORY OF HER PARENTS, AUSTIN AND ELIZABETH SPAHR MCELROY 2002.028

92 CATALOG 56: Howard Thomas (Milwaukee) Jones Island Oil on board | 20" x 24" | 1935

PARTIAL GIFT OF ANN WALL THOMAS MUSEUM OF WISCONSIN ART COLLECTION

93 CATALOG 57: Paul B. Travis (Cleveland) Grand Canyon Watercolor on paper | 19" x 25" | 1950

COLLECTION OF DR. AND MRS. MICHAEL DREYFUSS

94 Spirit and Imagination

Modernism not only liberated artists to experiment with radical distortions of form and color, but also new realms of emotional and conceptual experience. Charles Burchfield and William Sommer of Cleveland expressed their desire to liberate the unconscious mind and convey the “life force” of objects. “Art is no longer a sensation we take up with the eyes alone,” Sommer declared. “Art is the creation of our spiritual, inward vision, nature just starts us off. Instead of working with the eyes, we conceive with the unconscious and thus the [artist’s] complete changing of nature.”1 Abandoning traditional concerns with technical control and “finish,” Sommer painted as spontaneously as possible to achieve emotional intensity and personal authenticity. His painting Bach Chord of 1923 reflects his search for mysterious correspondences lying deep within the mind between color and music. Dulah Evans Krehbiel of Chicago created her own imaginative vision of analogies between expressive color and sound in her painting Music of 1920. A fascination with the bizarre and the fantastic, coupled with a desire to explore the strange, mysterious world of things felt but not seen, became a dominate trend in Midwestern modernism of the 1930s and 1940s. This desire to explore a hidden dimension behind the banality of everyday life, and to expose the illogic behind the assumed rationality of the modern world, is widely associated with the term Magic Realism. Although often linked to European Surrealism, Magic Realism was never an organized movement with a designated leader or codified doctrines.2 Instead, it was a loosely defined concept that gained currency in critical discourse of the period and was applied to artists who merged representational styles with elements of fantasy and imagination. Howard Thomas of Chicago and Milwaukee, Gertrude Abercrombie of Chicago and Madison, and Raymond Breinin of Chicago are but a few Midwestern artists associated with Magic Realism. Their paintings exemplify the intense engagement with new areas of imaginative and conceptual experience that became key aspects of modernism in the Midwest during the middle decades of the twentieth century.

1 Sommer Papers, AAA. 2 The origins of the term are discussed in note 17 of this essay.

95 CATALOG 58: Charles Burchfield (Cleveland/Salem/Buffalo) Twilight Moon Watercolor on paper | 20" x 14" | 1916

COLUMBUS MUSEUM OF ART, OHIO MUSEUM PURCHASE, HOWALD FUND 2002.021

96 CATALOG 59: William Sommer (Cleveland/Akron) The Pool Oil on panel | 80.7 cm x 60 cm | c. 1918

CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART SILVER JUBILEE TREASURE FUND, 1945.46

97 CATALOG 60: William Sommer (Cleveland/Akron) Bach Chord Oil on composition board | 20" x 23.75" | 1923

COLLECTION OF THE AKRON ART MUSEUM GIFT OF RUSSELL MUNN IN MEMORY OF HELEN G. MUNN

98 CATALOF 61: Dulah Evans Krehbiel (Chicago) Music Oil on canvas | 36" x 44" | c. 1920

ESTATE OF THE ARTIST COURTESY RICHARD NORTON GALLERY, CHICAGO

99 CATALOG 62: Howard Thomas (Chicago/Milwaukee) Boat and Turtle Watercolor on paper | 14" x 18" | c. 1936

PARTIAL GIFT OF ANN WALL THOMAS MUSEUM OF WISCONSIN ART COLLECTION

100 CATALOG 63: Gertrude Abercrombie (Chicago) The Pump Oil on canvas | 24" x 30" | 1938

PERMANENT COLLECTION, WESTERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY ART GALLERY, MACOMB, ILLINOIS

101 CATALOG 64: Raymond Breinin (Illinois/Minnesota) The Dead Tree Watercolor on illustration board | 23.5" x 31.75" | 1937

COLLECTION OF THE ILLINOIS STATE MUSEUM GIFT OF HARRIET CRUMMER

102 CATALOG 65: Gertrude Abercrombie (Chicago) Untitled Oil on canvas board | 9.75" x 13.75" | 1939

COLLECTIION OF CLIFFORD LAW OFFICES, CHICAGO COURTESY RICHARD NORTON GALLERY, CHICAGO

103 CATALOG 66: Raphael Gleitsmann (Akron) Chateau at Aulnoise Oil on cardboard | 29.25" x 41.25" | 1946

MASSILLON MUSEUM COLLECTION GIFT OF ALBERT E. HISE 76.9.16

104 Artist Biographies

Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–1977) Emil Armin (1883–1971)

Born in Austin, Texas, Gertrude Abercrombie was the Born in Romania, Emil Armin studied for a short time only child of Tom and Lula Janes Abercrombie, who at an arts and crafts school in Czernowitz (in present- worked in a traveling opera company. In 1913, her day Ukraine) before emigrating to the United States mother was offered the opportunity to study in Berlin, in 1905. He continued his education at the School where the family lived until the onset of World War I. of the Art Institute of Chicago. He attended part-time Abercrombie graduated from the University of Illinois from 1907 to 1911, and returned as a full-time in 1929 with a Bachelor’s degree in Romance student in 1916. He graduated when he was 37, Languages. After college she studied art for a short in 1920. He studied under Dudley Crafts Watson, time at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and as well guest instructors George Bellows and Randall the American Academy of Art. She worked briefly Davey from the Ashcan School. Armin became very as a commercial artist, and began painting in earnest active in various artists’ groups in Chicago, including in 1932. In 1934, she was employed by the Works the Chicago No-Jury Society of Artists, the Cor Progress Administration. She exhibited regularly Ardens and Ten Artists, frequently exhibited alongside throughout her life in Chicago and New York City. other artists in these various groups. His work was In 1952 alone she had five one-woman shows, showcased in one-man exhibitions at the Art Institute participated in four group shows, and produced of Chicago, the Kansas City Art Institute, and The over 125 paintings. Abercrombie died in 1977 Renaissance Society in Chicago. His Hyde Park after suffering for many years from pancreatitis, studio was located in the 57th Street Art Colony. severe arthritis and complications aggravated He was still involved with the 57th Street Art Colony by alcoholism. well into the 1930s, when he traveled with them to paint at the Indiana Dunes. He also traveled and painted in Mexico and New Mexico. Armin taught Ivan Albright (1897–1983) at Chicago’s Hull House from 1925 to 1926, and at the Jewish Peoples Institute from 1931 to 1932. He Ivan Le Lorraine Albright and his twin brother, was part of the easel section of the Works Progress Malvin, were born in 1897 to artist Adam Emory Administration and Public Works of Art Project during Albright and Clara Wilson Albright. He served in the Depression. World War I, assigned part of the time to a base hospital in Nantes, France, where he filled eight medical sketchbooks with drawings that portray Thomas Hart Benton (1889–1975) a clinical attention to detail and a feeling for the vulnerability of human flesh. After the war he studied Born in Neosho, Missouri, Thomas Hart Benton was briefly at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Nantes, before named for his uncle, Senator Thomas Hart Benton, returning to the United States. In 1920, he and his the first senator from Missouri. In 1907, he attended brother enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of the Art Institute of Chicago, but in 1908 he traveled Chicago with full tuition scholarships. While Ivan to Paris to study art at the Académie Julian for three pursued painting, Malvin pursued sculpture, and years. While in Paris, Benton associated with John both graduated in 1923. They then attended the Marin, Diego Rivera, Morgan Russell, and Stanton Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in the fall of MacDonald-Wright. Early in his career, he 1923, but moved to New York City for the spring experimented with a number of modernist styles term of 1924. Ivan enrolled for a semester at the including Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, Post- National Academy of Design and Malvin attended Impressionism and Synchromism. In 1912 he the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design. Afterwards the returned to the United States and set up a studio twins rented a studio together in Philadelphia from in New York City. After serving as a draftsman in the fall of 1925 through the spring of 1926. By World War I at the Naval Base in Norfolk, Virginia, mid-1927, both twins were back in Illinois at the Benton returned to New York City and taught at the studio of their father in a former Methodist church in Chelsea Neighborhood Association, in public Warrenville. In 1946, at the age of 49, Ivan married schools, and at the Art Students League throughout Josephine Medill Patterson Reeve, the daughter of the the 1920s and 1930s. It was at the Art Students founder of New York Daily News. He adopted the League that he instructed his most famous student, two children from her previous marriage, and they Jackson Pollock. After the war, he became had two additional children of their own. increasingly critical of international modernism and turned to major mural paintings associated with grassroots America. In 1922, Benton married one of his students, Rita Piacenza. In 1935, Benton and his wife moved to Kansas City, Missouri, where he directed the Art Institute until 1941. By the late 1930s, Benton, along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, had become one of the most acclaimed regionalist painters of the American Scene movement. He remained in Kansas City until his death in 1975.

105 Charles Biederman (1906-2004) Albert Bloch (1882–1961)

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Charles Biederman began Albert Bloch was born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a his artistic career as a teenager, apprenticing to a Bohemian-Jewish immigrant father and a German- graphic designer. He moved to Chicago and Jewish mother. Bloch dropped out of high school attended the Art Institute from 1924 to 29. Practicing at the age of sixteen to study at the St. Louis School as an artist—working primarily in painting—he of Fine Arts for two years. He began his art career eventually moved to New York from 1934-1940. as a newspaper illustrator for The St. Louis Mirror. During this time, he spent nine months in Paris, where The editor and publisher of the paper, William he frequented museums and artist studios, seeking Marion Reedy, funded Bloch’s trip to Europe to inspiration from artists like Jean Arp, Pablo Picasso further his artistic career. He visited London and and Piet Mondrian for what would develop into his Paris before eventually settling in Munich, and own abstract and Constructivist style that assumed the instead of attending the Royal Bavarian Academy, form of reliefs. Biederman moved back to Chicago he chose to teach himself. While in Munich, Bloch in 1941, married Mary Katherine Moore, and moved was invited to join Wassily Kandinsky and Franz to Red Wing, Minnesota, where they lived the Marc’s new group, Der Blaue Reiter (the Blue Rider), remainder of their lives. Upon first moving to Red becoming the only American artist associated with Wing, Biederman worked on an army medical the group. Between 1909 and 1921, Bloch lived project and took a three-year hiatus from making art. with his wife and son in Germany, with brief trips Upon resuming in 1945, he focused his attention on to other countries on the Continent and to America. painted aluminum reliefs and other three-dimensional In 1921, having become disheartened with what work. Biederman also became interested in writing Germany had become after World War I, Bloch and self-published several books on art theory returned to the United States, where he remained including Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge until his death in 1961. In order to make a living (1948) and The End of Modernism (1994). upon his return, Bloch became a teacher. He taught at the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts in 1922, and from 1923 until his retirement in 1947, Bloch was August F. Biehle (1885–1979) Professor and head of the Department of Drawing and Painting at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. August F. Biehle, Jr. was born in Cleveland, Ohio. His family had emigrated to America from Freiburg, Germany. Both his father and his uncle were Masters Raymond Breinin (1910–2000) in the Decorators Guild, and continued their work as decorators in Cleveland. He completed a three-year Born in Vitebsk, Russia, Raymond Breinin became apprenticeship with his father, learning commercial a student of Marc Chagall’s former teacher, Uri Penn, art and mural painting. When he was 18, he studied at the age of seven. He later attended the Vitebsk at an arts and crafts school in Munich, Germany. He Academy of Art, which was founded by Chagall. worked for Sherwin-Williams when he returned to In 1922, his family left Russia to escape communism Cleveland in 1905, continuing his studies at the and settled in Chicago. Like many other immigrants, Cleveland School of Art. When he was 25, he Breinin worked a variety of jobs while attending returned to Munich, where he studied for a short time evening and Saturday classes at the Chicago at the Royal Academy. His European education Academy of Fine Arts and the School of the Art exposed him to Jugendstil and later to the Blaue Institute of Chicago. He began his professional life Reiter artists. Back in Cleveland a few years later, he as an artist on the Illinois Art Project of the Works began his career as a commercial lithographer. He Progress Administration. He taught at Southern served a lithography apprenticeship with co-worker Illinois University from 1943 to 1944, and later at and fellow painter William Sommer. He became the University of Minnesota. From the 1960s through active in the avant-garde Kokoon Arts Club, and the 1980s he taught painting and life drawing at the began having solo exhibits at the club beginning in Art Students League and the National Academy of 1915. He pursued his interest in plein-air painting at Design in New York. His work was included in Henry Keller’s “summer school.” He often exhibited exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago work at the Cleveland Museum of Art, frequently at Society of Artists, Corcoran Gallery in Washington, their May Shows, throughout his career. During the D.C., Museum of Modern Art, Pennsylvania war, he created lithograph maps for the U.S. Army. Academy of Fine Arts and the Whitney He retired from printmaking in 1952, but continued Museum of American Art. to paint, frequently exhibiting in the Cleveland area. In 1959, he was part of a three-person show at the Regional Gallery in New York along with his son and daughter-in-law.

106 Charles Burchfield (1893–1967) Alexander Corazzo (1908–1971)

Born in Ashtabula Harbor, Ohio, Charles Ephraim Alexander Corazzo was born in Lyon, France. Burchfield moved to Salem, Ohio at the age of five From 1918 through 1924, he studied at the National after the death of his father. After graduating from Conservatory of Music in Lyon, and upon completing high school, he attended the Cleveland School of Art his musical training, went on to study civil engineering. on scholarship, where his most influential teacher was He emigrated to the United States in 1927 and Henry Keller. He was also influenced by Cleveland studied art at the St. Paul School of Art in Minnesota modernist William Sommer—Burchfield attended from 1929 to 1934. In 1935, he was invited to join sessions of the Kokoon Club which was organized by the Abstraction-Creation group, a loose association Sommer and William Zorach to promote avant-garde of artists formed in Paris in 1931 to counteract the art. Upon graduating in 1916, Burchfield returned influence of Surrealism. Only a few other American briefly to Salem before accepting a scholarship from painters—among them Carl Holty, Leroy Turner and the Cleveland School of Art to attend the National Alexander Calder—were part of the group. He Academy of Design in New York, where according attended Laszlo Moholy-Nagy’s New Bauhaus School to various sources he either stayed one day or two in Chicago in 1937, but financial problems closed months. He served in World War I from 1918 to the school after its first year. Moholy-Nagy reopened 1919. In 1921, Burchfield married Bertha Kenreich it as the School of Design (later the Institute of and moved to Buffalo, New York, where he worked Design); however, Corazzo became disenchanted as a wallpaper designer for the M.H. Birge and with the changes in curriculum and, along with a Sons Wallpaper Company until 1929. His career small group of other students, dropped out in 1938 advanced rapidly, and he was awarded a solo to protest the school’s growing emphasis on design show at the Museum of Modern Art before he turned instead of painting. Corazzo exhibited nationally forty. Other solo exhibitions followed at the Phillips throughout the 1930s and 1940s at various Collection in Washington, D.C., the Whitney Museum museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, the of American Art in New York, and elsewhere. He San Francisco Museum of Art, the National Gallery lived the remainder of his time in Buffalo and devoted of Art and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. He himself full time to painting with brief stints as a enrolled in the Illinois Institute of Technology in the teacher at the Art Institute of Buffalo from 1949 1940s, where he studied with Mies van der Rohe, to 1952 and at the University of Buffalo from was awarded an architectural degree in 1946, and 1950 to 1952. practiced architecture until his death in 1971.

Francis Chapin (1899–1965) Manierre Dawson (1887–1969)

Francis Chapin was a Chicago-based painter well Manierre Dawson, born to a wealthy Chicago family, known for his colorful paintings of the American received no academic art training beyond his high scene. He was born in Bristolville, Ohio, graduated school art class. It was, however, in Chicago’s from Washington and Jefferson College in 1921, Wendell Phillips High School where he was inspired and began attending the School of the Art Institute to pursue abstraction, the style for which he is best of Chicago the following year. His last year of known. Following graduation in 1905, he enrolled study, he was awarded the Bryan Lathrop Traveling in the Armour Institute of Technology to pursue a Scholarship. After a year in Europe, he returned to degree in architectural engineering. He drew Chicago. He became an influential teacher at the and painted prolifically, working to improve his School of the Art Institute, where he taught painting representation of three-dimensional form while and lithography for over 20 years. His work was developing a personal style that blended abstraction shown at numerous galleries and museums throughout with references to architectural design. Upon the United States and abroad, including annual graduating in 1909, Dawson accepted a design job shows at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and with an architectural firm. He continued painting, the National Academy of Design, as well as biennial inspired by the art and architecture viewed on a shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art and the European visit. He was invited to exhibit his paintings Whitney Museum of American Art. Although he was in the famous 1913 Armory Show, and did have one best known for his paintings of the Chicago area, he included in the Chicago venue of the traveling exhibit. also frequently painted in other regions. He taught Dawson was greatly affected by Marcel Duchamp’s landscape painting at the School of the Art Institute’s work in this show, and sought to bring the same level summer school in Saugatuck, Michigan, and served of movement to his own abstracted figurative paintings. as an Artist-in-Residence for some time at the Old By 1914, the style of his artwork had grown even Sculpin Gallery in Martha’s Vineyard. He also often more abstract, reduced to series of energetic shapes traveled to Mexico and Europe to paint. Chapin dancing across the canvas surface. The rapid served as director of the School of the Art Institute acceleration of his painting career would slow of Chicago from 1941 to 1945. significantly a few years later. Abandoning his architectural career, Dawson purchased a large tract of land in Ludington, Michigan and took up fruit farming in 1915. He married that same year, and although farm and family consumed a great deal of his time, he welcomed moments of free time to paint. Dawson exhibited his work only twice more during his lifetime, in 1922 at the Milwaukee Arts Society and again in 1966 at the Grand Rapids Art Museum. 107 Clara Deike (1881–1964) Karl Gasslander (1905–1997)

Clara Louise Deike was born in Detroit, Michigan, A painter, teacher, and writer, Karl Gasslander, born and arrived in Cleveland with her family shortly in Rockford, Illinois, was a gradute of Northwestern afterwards. She received an associate degree in University. In 1929, he gained a Master of Fine Arts education from the Cleveland Normal School in degree from the Teacher’s College of Columbia 1901 and began teaching elementary school in Ohio University. Gasslander’s teaching resume included and Kentucky. In 1909, she began studying art at serving as head of the Department of Commercial Art the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, but later at the Dallas Art Institute, North Texas State Teacher’s that fall enrolled at the Cleveland School of Art, College, and a return to Northwestern University as where she graduated in 1912. As a student of a professor of art and interior design, where he Henry Keller, she also attended his summer art was named the head of the Drawing and Painting school in Berlin Heights from 1909 to 1920. After Department around 1932. Four years later graduating from the Cleveland School of Art, Deike Gasslander taught at Evanston Collegiate Institute taught art in the Cleveland school system until 1945. (presently Kendall College), then moved on to other She spent nine months of the year teaching, and Midwestern institutions in Indiana, Michigan and used her summer vacations to paint. This was when Missouri. Gasslander, also known for his writing, she produced the majority of her work. Throughout served as the art critic and columnist in “The Art her career she continued her artistic study with Portfolio,” an art and design publication for the artists such as Hugh Breckenridge in Gloucester, Evanston Daily News-Index. He was an associate Massachusetts, between 1921 and 1923; Hans of the Chicago Society of Artists and the Swedish- Hofmann in Capri and Munich from 1925 to 1927; American Art Association. Karl Gasslander died and Diego Rivera in Mexico in 1930. She exhibited at age 92 while retired in Lake Ozark, Missouri, widely, including every year at the Cleveland in 1997. Museum of Art’s May Show from 1919 to 1959. She died at the age of 83 in 1964. Todros Geller (1889–1949)

Rowena Fry (1898–1990) Born in Vinnitsa, Ukraine, in 1889, Todros Geller first studied art in Odessa, Russia. In 1906 he emigrated Born in Athens, Alabama, Rowena Fry received her to Montreal, Canada, to further his art studies. He first art training at the Watkins Institute in Nashville, married and moved to Chicago around 1918, and Tennessee. She arrived in Chicago in the late attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 1920s, where she attended the Art Institute of Geller trained as a wood engraver, painter, and Chicago and the Hubert Ropp School of Art. During stained glass creator. He was said to have been 1938 and 1939 she worked for the Works Project taught by George Bellows in 1919, and began Administration in Lake Forest, Illinois, and created exhibiting at the Art Institute in 1925. In 1932, both paintings and murals. Fry described her during the early years of the Great Depression, paintings as “American Naïve” and depicted Geller took part in the Grant Park Art Fair, with other numerous neighborhood scenes of the Near North notable Chicago artists, including Emil Armin, Aaron Side of Chicago. Her style and subject matter, which Bohrod, and Julio DeDiego. Geller became known contrasted with social realistic views of industry and as the “Dean of Chicago Jewish Artists,” serving as frustrated city dwellers and skyscrapers, placed her president of the Chicago Society of Artists and The among the prevalent American scene painters of American Jewish Club. A leading authority on the 1920s and 1930s. During World War II, Fry Jewish art, Geller designed stained-glass windows worked at the Great Lakes Naval Hospital and taught in temples and synagogues throughout the United art classes to recuperating sailors. Her work was States. In 1936, Geller signed the call for the First exhibited at the Chicago Society of Artists and American Artists Congress, which was a stand the Art Institute of Chicago. against fascism. Geller taught at the Jewish People’s Institute in Chicago, the College of Jewish Studies, the Hull House, and was also a member of the Leon Garland (1896–1941) supervisory staff of the Board of Jewish Education. In his lifetime, he was given five one-man shows, Born in Borbruisk, Russia, Leon Garland emigrated constantly exhibited his works in the Art Institute to the United States in 1913 when he was just 17 of Chicago’s annual exhibition, and continued years old. Garland settled in Chicago and became producing work until his death in 1949. When an artist of many trades, including painting, textiles, Todros Geller passed away, the Board of Jewish stained glass, metals, and more. He never Education and the American Jewish Arts Club concerned himself with the sale of his work, and sponsored his memorial exhibition. found more interest in gaining knowledge and criticism from his friends and peers. Garland studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and then at the Hull House School of Art, where he later taught textiles and metals until his death. There he met Sadie Ellis, whom he would marry in 1927. Together they traveled through Europe, and studied in Paris at the Andre Lhote School. He created forty paintings for the WPA and became known for his modern town landscapes and scenes from his early life. 108 Raphael Gleitsmann (1910–1995) Carl Hoeckner (1883–1972)

Raphael Gleitsmann, born in Dayton, Ohio, grew up Carl Hoeckner, a painter, lithographer, muralist, and in Akron. His father, an architect, also dabbled in teacher, was born in Munich, Germany. He came painting, a hobby that helped spur his son’s desire to from a family of printmakers in Austria and Germany, pursue artistic outlets. Unable to afford tuition at the some of whom dated back to the seventeenth century. Cleveland School of Art (now Cleveland Institute of Hoeckner trained at academies in Hamburg and Art), Gleitsmann did attend free lectures given by Cologne, later beginning his work as an artist in instructor Paul Travis, who belonged to a group of Munich, illustrating for magazines, and training as artists known as the “Cleveland School.” Seeking out a lithographer. He emigrated to the United States exposure to the arts whenever possible, he became and settled in Chicago in 1910. He began teaching acquainted with area painters, and was able to focus at the Art Institute of Chicago and working as a these influences into his own brand of realism, more commercial artist. Hoeckner is best known for his simplified and idealized than the styles of Paul Travis paintings of war and political and social injustices, and Edward Hopper, whose paintings of small town although he also painted an occasional landscape. America he greatly admired. Gleitsmann most From 1918 to 1927, Hoeckner organized an frequently painted in oil on masonite and widely exhibition of his protest paintings and showed it exhibited in Northeast Ohio, New York, and Chicago throughout the United States, which received some prior to receiving his inaugural one-man show at success. He became an instructor at the Art Institute the Massillon Museum in 1939. The Midwest of Chicago in 1929, teaching industrial design. landscape—and Ohio in particular—played a In the 1930s he served as director of the graphics recurring role in the artist’s work. He continued to division of the Illinois Art Project of the Works develop his painting skills and style, attending art Progress Administration. classes in Marietta, Ohio, under the instruction of Clyde Singer and Harry Shaw. Called to military duty in 1943, and injured in 1945, he returned to Carl Robert Holty (1900–1973) his hometown a changed artist: the realism of his pre-war years had morphed into a looser, Born in Frieburg, Germany, Carl Holty’s family moved expressionistic style, with darker, more mature to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, when he was one year tones. Gleitsmann continued to exhibit his work old. He attended Marquette University to become a nationally, and among his greatest achievements doctor, but decided to pursue a career as an artist. was receipt of first prize in a 1948 Carnegie Institute He enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago in 1919 exhibition of international contemporary painting. and moved a year later to New York to study at the Parsons School of Design and the National Academy of Design. Holty returned to Chicago in 1923 and William Grauer (1895–1985) began working as a portraitist. In 1926, after marrying his first wife, he went to Munich, where he Born on December 2, 1895, in Philadelphia, intended to study at the Royal Academy. A friend William C. Grauer was a painter, muralist, encouraged him to attend Hans Hofmann’s school. and teacher. In 1914, he graduated from the Following his wife’s death from tuberculosis in 1930, Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, Holty moved to Paris, where he eventually joined the and moved on to postgraduate work with a four-year Abstraction-Creation group, whose founders included City of Philadelphia scholarship. Grauer became a Jean Arp, Theo van Doesburg and Albert Gleizes. designer at the Decorative Stained Glass Co. in He returned to New York in 1935 and participated Philadelphia, served overseas in WWI, then moved in the founding of the American Abstract Artists, to Akron, Ohio, where he opened an art studio with remaining a member until 1944. Between 1935 his future brother-in-law, architect George Evans and 1940, Holty spent time visiting Wisconsin, Mitchell. Grauer moved to Cleveland in 1927, where he delivered lectures funded by the Federal and married fellow Philadelphian Natalie Eynon. Forum of the WPA, Department of Education. In He lectured in art at Cleveland College from 1934 1935, he gave 21 lectures a week for five weeks to 1948. During the late 1930s he started the art in Milwaukee and surrounding areas. During his department at Cleveland College of Western Reserve later career, he taught at the Art Students League, University. His wife Natalie Eynon died in 1955. the Institute of Fine Arts at Washington University Grauer re-married in 1964 to Dorothy Turobinski, in Saint Louis, and Brooklyn College. a well-known weaver. In 1966 Grauer retired from Western Reserve University, was declared associate professor emeritus, and continued to paint and to teach privately.

109 Joe Jones (1909–1963) Albert H. Krehbiel (1873–1945)

Largely self-taught as an artist, Joe Jones was born Albert Henry Krehbiel was a painter, a teacher, and in 1909 in St. Louis, Missouri, and grew up on the a muralist. Born in Denmark, Iowa, and raised in edge of a slum neighborhood. He left school at the Newton, Kansas, he was the son of a buggy maker. age of fourteen and began traveling the country, Krehbiel studied blacksmithing at Bethel College, a living life as a hobo. He eventually returned home school co-founded by his father, and graduated in to St. Louis and pursued his father’s trade as a house 1895. Krehbiel then pursued a career in art at the painter. After becoming interested in decorating, he Art Institute of Chicago, and later, with a traveling attended night school and met with artists after work, scholarship, at the Academie Julian in Paris, where painting until three or four a.m. Jones soon began to his instructors included history painter and muralist win awards for portraits of his family, scenes of ash John Paul Laurens. Krehbiel won four gold metals cans, factories, and railroad crossings. He signed at the academy, the most awarded to an American. up for the Public Works of Art Project in 1934 and He then returned from Paris in 1906 to marry Dulah during this period he was awarded five major mural Evans, a fellow student at the Art Institute of Chicago, commissions for post offices in Kansas, Arkansas, where he served as a faculty member from 1906 to and Missouri. He left St. Louis in 1935 to pursue 1945. Krehbiel also taught at the Illinois Institute of his art career in New York where he held his first Technology from 1913 to 1945. He and his wife exhibition in the same year. In 1943, Jones joined built a home and art studio in Park Ridge, Illinois, the War Art Unit a few months before it was in 1910. He created many vastly popular public disbanded and subsequently became a Life murals, such as those in Chicago and Springfield, magazine correspondent. Illinois. His style began as traditional academic,and later moved from impressionism to abstraction. He set up the Art Institute of Chicago Summer School Henry George Keller (1869–1949) of Painting in Saugatuck, Michigan, and founded the Albert Krehbiel School of Painting. Krehbiel died in Raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Henry Keller studied Evanston, Illinois, on June 29, 1945, the day of his initally at the Western Reserve School of Design for retirement from the Art Institute of Chicago. He was Women, and in Karlsruhe, Germany, with landscape well-known during his life, but remained mostly painter Hermann Baisch. He worked for a lithograph unknown after his death until recently. Most of this company for eight years before returning to Germany was due to his avoidance of self-promotion. Krehbiel in 1899, where he enrolled in major art academies also refused to sell his paintings, choosing to give in Dusseldorf and Munich, and felt the influence of them away to family for special occasions. Jugendstil, or the Modern Style, that had emerged as a major force in the German art world. Keller returned to Ohio in 1903 and assumed a teaching Dulah Evans Krehbiel (1875–1951) position at the Cleveland School of Art (now Institute). Charles Burchfield and Paul Travis were among his Dulah Evans Krehbiel of Oskaloosa, Iowa, was a students. Watercolor was the artist's most familiar graduate of the Art Institute of Chicago, attended medium and the landscape a frequent subject in his Penn College, and later received postgraduate work. Inspired by everything modern—interpretive education at the Art Students League in New York. dance, the circus, and color theory—Keller Krehbiel also studied at the New School of Art and incorporated these influences into his painting, at the Charles Hawthorne School in Provincetown, which is characterized by free brushstrokes, heavy Massachusetts. From 1903 through 1905 she held shadows and imaginative color combinations. a place at the acclaimed Tree Studio building in He passionately promoted modernist thought and Chicago, along with many other well-known artists. techniques through his teaching and membership in In 1906, she left the Tree Studio to marry Albert art organizations like the Cleveland Independents. Henry Krehbiel, a fellow student at the Art Institute of Henry Keller was recognized numerous times Chicago. She became a successful commercial artist, throughout his career, receiving the silver medal at illustrating for such publications as Ladies' Home the Munich Kunstakademie's spring exhibition (1902) Journal, Leslie's Illustrated Weekly, and Harper's and an award at the Art Institute of Chicago (1929). Bazaar. The Krehbiels often painted together and He exhibited widely throughout the United States and used the same subjects in their artwork. From 1910 was included in New York's famous 1913 Armory through 1915, she worked in her "Ridge Crafts Show. Keller lived the remainder of his life in San Studio" in Park Ridge, Illinois. From 1917 through Diego, where he moved after retiring from the 1920 Krehbiel spent summers in California, where Cleveland School of Art in 1945. she began painting in a modernistic style.

110 Lucius Kutchin (1901–1936) Arthur Osver (1912–2006)

Lucius Kutchin was born Lucius Brown, probably Arthur Osver was born in Chicago. As a child he in McArthur, Ohio, in 1901. His mother died of resided for a time in Youngstown, Ohio, where his tuberculosis in 1915, and after a period of time fascination with urban landscapes first began. This living with extended family, he was adopted by Mrs. theme was featured in his artwork, first in the style Emma Louise Kutchin of Columbus, Ohio, in 1918. of realism, later becoming more abstract. He was During travels to St. Petersburg, Florida, with his educated at Northwestern University and the adoptive mother, he received his first art instruction. University of Chicago, where he met his wife, He later began studies at the Columbus Art School in Ernestine Betsberg, also an artist. From 1940 to the 1921 studying with Alice Schille and Charles Rosen. late 1950s. he lived and worked in New York City From 1922 to 1924, he was also enrolled in the and New England, first at the Brooklyn Museum Art Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, winning School, then Columbia University, and later at Yale two Cresson Travel Scholarships in 1927 and 1928. University and Cooper Union. Over his career he He spent time in Paris and Capri, and returned to won many awards and fellowships, including a settle close to Santa Fe, New Mexico. He lived in Guggenheim fellowship (1948–49) and the Prix the Southwest until his return to Columbus in 1931, de Rome (1952), visiting Italy and France several where he remained until his death at the age of thirty- times during the 1950s. In 1960 he returned to the five. Throughout his career, he played an active role Midwest, settling in St. Louis to teach at Washington in the Columbus art community, frequently exhibiting University as Professor of Art, where he remained at the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts as well as until his retirement in 1981. His paintings can be numerous other venues. He also served as Sunday found in prominent museums and private collections Art Editor of the Columbus Dispatch from 1934 to around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum 1935. During the last four years of his life his work of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art was exhibited much more widely. He was part of Institute of Chicago, and the Smithsonian. group shows in Chicago, Colorado Springs, New York, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. He was represented by Milch Gallery in New York, and fea- Romolo Roberti (1896–1988) tured in one-artist shows in Detroit, Boston, and Santa Fe. He died of bronchial pneumonia in Columbus, Roberti was born in Montelanico, Italy. He traveled Ohio, in 1936. to New York with his father on a business trip when he was a teenager, and decided to stay in the United States. Alone in America, Roberti began to pursue Harold Noecker (1912–2002) his dream of becoming an artist. He settled in Ithaca, New York, in 1913, working as an on-campus Harold Noecker, born in Urbana, Illinois, was a maintenance man for Cornell University. He never celebrated Chicago painter in the 1930s and 1940s, took formal studies at Cornell, but received his first and has recently been rediscovered. His paintings art training from Christian Midjo, one of Cornell’s top included a typical subject matter for the period— architecture professors. The knowledge gained from architecture, street-life etc.—but with a mysterious Midjo was paramount in Roberti’s development as a twist. Noecker's painting style can be described life-long painter. Roberti moved to Chicago in 1922 as both surrealistic and realistic. He trained as an and began taking courses at the Art Institute of architect at the University of Illinois, and took art Chicago. Lack of money forced him to drop out courses at the Chicago Academy of Fine Art. before finishing his courses. To support himself he Noecker’s style is closely related to fellow Chicagoan became a painter and decorator for hire. Though Gertrude Abercrombie, a surrealist, with whom he struggling for revenue, Roberti consistently exhibited shared a joint exhibition in 1944 at the Art Institute paintings at the annual Chicago No-Jury Society of of Chicago. Artists exhibitions. He moved into the Tree Studios Building in Chicago, a world-renowned artist community, in 1927. Roberti then developed a friend Gregory Orloff (1890–1981) and rival in William Schwartz, and completed some of his career’s strongest work while in the community, Gregory Orloff was born in Kiev, Russia, where he his Chicago winter street scenes. Schwartz and first began studying art. He later moved to the Roberti developed together, working alongside United States and began studying at the National one another, which is evident in their similar styles. Academy of Design in New York and the School Roberti left Chicago in 1939 and traveled around the of the Art Institute of Chicago. During the Great country looking for work as a painter and decorator Depression he resided in Chicago and worked as until 1967. While traveling, he produced many an artist for the Works Progress Administration. Like landscape paintings depicting various locations other Chicago artists, Orloff painted the parks and around the United States. Roberti settled in Gautier, beaches of Chicago as well as a series of paintings Mississippi, in 1967, and continued painting until that focused on nightclubs, restaurants, and public his death. entertainments, probably inspired by the Century of Progress World’s Fair of 1933. While his work from the 1920s is inspired by modernist styles, his later work reflects his interest in social realism and regionalism. His many lithographs, woodcuts, etchings, and paintings are of Chicago’s diverse residents and social life. In his later career he became a successful illustrator of books. 111 Alice Schille (1869–1955) William Sommer (1867–1949)

A native of Columbus, Ohio, Alice Schille graduated Born in Detroit, Michigan, William Sommer began at the top of her class from the Columbus Art School, taking art lessons at the age of 12, apprenticed to and enrolled in the Art Students League of New York. a lithographer in his teenage years, and eventually After touring the major cities and art centers of secured jobs in Detroit and New York working for Europe, Schille settled in Paris to continue her artistic lithography companies. Just before moving to New training. Often called one of the finest watercolor York in 1891, he traveled throughout Europe to artists of her time, she also worked in oils, winning England, Germany, Italy and Holland. In 1899 major prizes and exhibiting throughout the United Sommer moved to Roseville, New Jersey, and in States and Paris. In 1904, five of her paintings were 1907 he returned to the Midwest, settling first in accepted for exhibition at the Societe Nationale des Lakewood, Ohio, and later to Brandywine (1914). Beaux Arts. In 1904, she returned to Columbus and While employed by Otis Lithograph Company in taught at the Columbus Art School for nearly fifty Cleveland, he remained active in the local arts scene, years. Her paintings focused on people and social helping to found the renowned Kokoon Arts Club and interaction. She was very interested in modern art exhibiting his work constantly. Sommer studied with and the avant-garde, becoming friends with the likes Cleveland artists Abel Warshawksy and William and of Picasso, Rodin, Matisse, and Gertrude Stein. She Marguerite Zorach, and developed during his time traveled extensively in Europe between 1905 and in Cleveland a preference for watercolor. Strongly 1914, and from 1920 to 1940, in the summers, to influenced by the work of Post-Impressionists as New Mexico, Central America, and Africa. Her well as that exhibited in the 1913 Armory show, work was regularly shown in important annual Sommer’s work reflects use of bold color, idealized American exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy proportions, and energetic lines. Among his major of Fine Arts, the Corcoran Gallery, American accomplishments were earning first prize in freehand Watercolor Society, and the Boston Art Club. drawing at the Cleveland Museum of Art’s May Show (1924) and receiving commissions for a number of Public Works projects in Ohio: Public William Samuel Schwartz (1896–1977) Hall, Cleveland (1933), Post Office, Geneva, Ohio (1938), and Board of Education Building, William Schwartz was born in Smorgon, Russia, Akron (1941). and was a scholarship student at the Vilna Art School from 1908 to 1912. He emigrated to the United States in 1913 where he lived in New York with Lucia Stern (1895–1989) a sister for a short time. In 1915, he headed for Omaha, Nebraska, to live with his brother and Lucia Stern was born Martha Ida Lucia Karker in pursue his interest in art. After studying briefly with Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She was formally trained in J. Laurie Wallace at the Kellom School, he attended music and literature before becoming a visual artist. the Art Institute of Chicago and graduated with In 1930 she married Milwaukee lawyer Erich Stern, honors in life drawing, portraiture and general with whom she took frequent trips to Europe, making painting. A trained musician, Schwartz regularly connections with the international art world. She performed in vaudeville, concerts, and operas, and was prolific in many mediums and often combined on radio throughout the 1920s to support himself as painting, drawing, and decoupage. In her later an artist. During the Depression he was an artist on career she experimented with sculpture, assemblages, the Federal Art Project payroll. He was a progressive architecture, sound, and light. She had frequent individualist aware of modernist art and received a showings in major cities in the U.S. and Europe. great deal of national acclaim. In addition to regular She was an advocate for art education and raising appearances in the juried exhibitions at the Art public awareness of progressive, non-objective visual Institute, Schwartz’s work was included in juried art, lecturing frequently, often at the Milwaukee Art shows at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Center. Later she would be known for her generosity the National Academy of Design, the Pennsylvania as a philanthropist for the Haggerty Museum at Academy of the Fine Arts, the Corcoran Museum Marquette University, which she helped to found, in Washington, D.C., and the Carnegie Museum and The Milwaukee Art Center. in Pittsburgh. He lived in Chicago until his death from complications due to Alzheimer’s in 1977.

112 Julia Thecla (1896–1973) Paul Travis (1891–1975)

Born in the rural town of Delavan, Illinois, Julia Paul Travis was born in rural Wellsville, Ohio, near Thecla Connell briefly attended Illinois State Normal the border of Pennsylvania. He moved to Cleveland University and taught at a small grade school in in 1918 to study at the Cleveland School of Art. He Tazewell County. By 1920 she had dropped her last served in the army in WWI, remaining afterward in name and moved to Chicago to study at the School Europe to take the “Grand Tour,” filling sketchbooks of the Art Institute of Chicago. She was to remain in with images of the great architecture and landscapes, Chicago for the rest of her life. Recognition of her along with portraits of his comrades. In 1920, he work was steady, and in 1931 she participated in returned to Ohio and began teaching at his alma the Art Institute’s International Watercolor Exhibition. mater, the Cleveland School of Art (now the In the following year, she was part of Chicago’s first Cleveland Institute of Art), where he remained until outdoor art fair. By 1943, Thecla had several one- 1957. In 1927 he took an influential trip to Africa, person exhibits in Chicago galleries as well as the inspiring subject matter that reappeared frequently Art Institute, and she had been invited to exhibit at in later works. He worked primarily in watercolor, the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In the along with drawing, and eventually photography. 1930s and 40s she created easel paints under the Later in his career he began to experiment with auspices of the Federal Art Project of the WPA. abstraction and bold colors in his paintings. Her small, imaginative paintings often depicted introspective women along with mysterious or Santos Zingale (1908–1999) fantastical imagery, an imagery that mirrored her own life and persona. She died in 1973 at the Santos Zingale’s parents emigrated from Sicily to Sacred Heart Home in the Chicago area. Wisconsin, where he was born in Milwaukee. His Italian heritage deeply influenced his love of the arts and inspired him to study art at the Milwaukee State Howard Thomas (1899–1971) Teacher’s College. He went on to receive his master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Howard Thomas began studies at the School of serving as a graduate assistant to American the Art Institute of Chicago in 1919. In the 1930s Regionalist painter John Steuart Curry. He worked he directed the Milwaukee Handicraft Program as an artist during World War II for the Federal sponsored by the Works Progress Administration. Government’s Arts and Design Project. Early in his Thomas taught high school for many years and in career he was a political activist, recording social 1930 began teaching at Milwaukee State Teachers and political injustice, the effects of the Depression, College. A frequent traveler, he collected sketches and the war with Hitler and Tojo, through his art. throughout the United States as inspiration for his Other subjects included the disappearing architecture work, with a particular interest in the work and home of cities he knew, urban and rural life, the immigrant life of African Americans. He moved to the South in experience, and African American life. He taught at the 1940s, first to Greensboro, North Carolina, the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1946 to where he chaired the art department of the University 1978. In 2006, Zingale was posthumously awarded of North Carolina (College for Women); and later the Wisconsin Visual Art Lifetime Achievement award. Decatur, Georgia, where he taught at Agnes Scott College. He finished his career as a faculty member of the art department at the University of Georgia, retiring in 1965. His wife, artist Anne Wall Thomas, co-produced a documentary on his artistic technique, which often used natural pigments, called “Earth Red, Howard Thomas Paints a Gouache” (1964).

113 Works in the Exhibition

Gertrude Abercrombie Charles Biederman Untitled (dunes), 1939 Cubist Self-Portrait, Chicago, January 1932 Oil on canvas board Oiloncanvas 9.75 x 13.75 inches 39.125 x 24.375 inches Collection of Clifford Law Offices, Chicago; Lent by the Weisman Art Museum Courtesy Richard Norton Gallery, Chicago University of Minnesota, Minneapolis Biederman Archive Gertrude Abercrombie Gift of Charles J. Biederman The Pump, 1938 Oil on canvas Charles Biederman 24 x 30 inches Untitled Chicago, April 1, 1934 Permanent Collection Oiloncanvas Western Illinois University Art Gallery 24.125 x 24.125 inches Macomb, Illinois Lent by the Weisman Art Museum University of Minnesota, Minneapolis Ivan Albright Biederman Archive There Were No Flowers Tonight, 1929 Gift of Charles J. Biederman Oil on canvas 48.3125 x 30.25 inches August F. Biehle, Jr. National Gallery of Art, Washington Changing Seasons, 1935 Gift of Robert H. and Clarice Smith Oilonboard 1972.7.1 32.5 x 23.5 inches MASSILLON MUSEUM AND SOUTHERN OHIO MUSEUM ONLY Lisa Biehle Files and Bruce Edward Files

Emil Armin August F. Biehle, Jr. The Gateway, 1927 Cleveland West Side, Hillside Houses, Oil on canvas c. 1914–1917 16 x 20 inches Oil on board Gift of Herman F. and Helen P. Johnson 28x39.5inches Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso University Frederick Biehle and Erika Hinrichs 2005.14 Albert Bloch Thomas Hart Benton Veranda, 1920 Constructivist Still Life, 1917–1918 Oil on paper Oil on paper 18 x 21.125 inches 17.5 x 13.625 inches Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Gift of Ferdinand Howald Gift of Carl A. Magnuson 1931.108 1963.006 Raymond Breinin Charles Biederman The Dead Tree, 1937 Landscape, Chicago, July 16, 1929 Watercolor on illustration board Oil on canvas 23.5 x 31.75 inches 30 x 22 inches Collection of the Illinois State Museum Lent by the Weisman Art Museum Gift of Harriet Crummer University of Minnesota, Minneapolis Biederman Archive Gift of Charles J. Biederman

114 Charles Burchfield Desert, c. 1920 Twilight Moon, 1916 Oil on masonite Watercolor on paper 22 x 28 inches 20 x 14 inches Collection of the Illinois State Museum Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Gift of Dr. Lewis J. Obi, Frank J. McKeown, Jr. Museum Purchase, Howald Fund and Lefferts Mabie 2002.021 MASSILLON MUSEUM AND RIFFE GALLERY ONLY Clara Deike Landscape, 1948 Charles Burchfield Oil on canvas Noon, 1917 25.5 x 23.5 inches Watercolor and gouache Collection of Daniel Bush 15.5 x 13.5 inches Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York Clara Deike Munich Self-Portrait, 1922 Charles Burchfield Oil on paper Trees and Ravine, 1917 23.5 x 18.5 inches Watercolor and gouache on paper Collection of Daniel Bush 18 x 12.25 inches Courtesy of DC Moore Gallery, New York Rowena Fry The Parking Lot, c. 1940 Francis Chapin Watercolor on paper By the El Tracks, c. 1935 23.5 x 29.5 inches Oil on canvas Collection of the Illinois State Museum 34 x 39 inches Courtesy of the Fine Arts Program Estate of the artist Public Buildings Service Courtesy Richard Norton Gallery, Chicago U.S. General Services Administration Commissioned through the New Deal Art Projects Alexander Corazzo Untitled (Self-Portrait Wearing a Hat), 1929 Leon Garland Oil on canvas The Blacksmith, c. 1940 40 x 30 inches Oil on canvas Tregoning & Company, Cleveland 29.25 x 35.25 inches Collection of the Illinois State Museum Manierre Dawson Courtesy of the Fine Arts Program Differential Complex, 1910 Public Buildings Service Oil on board U.S. General Services Administration 54.61 cm x 44.45 cm Commissioned through the New Deal Art Projects Cleveland Museum of Art Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund Karl Gasslander 2001.123 Apple Tree, 1935 MASSILLON MUSEUM, RIFFE GALLERY, AND SOUTHERN OHIO MUSEUM ONLY Oil on canvas 30 x 24 inches Manierre Dawson Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Private Collection Hercules I, 1913 Courtesy Richard Norton Gallery, Chicago Oil on canvas 36 x 28 inches Collection of the Illinois State Museum Gift of Dr. Lewis J. Obi, Frank J. McKeown, Jr. and Lefferts Mabie Manierre Dawson

115 Todros Geller Carl Holty Untitled (figure with black birds), 1929 Europa, 1948 Oil on canvas Oil on canvas 19.325 x 15.5 inches 18 x 14 inches Collection of Clifford Law Offices, Chicago Spanierman Gallery, LLC, New York Courtesy Richard Norton Gallery, Chicago MASSILLON MUSEUM AND RIFFE GALLERY ONLY Carl Holty Pink Lady, 1948 Raphael Gleitsmann Oil on masonite Untitled (farmhouse and out building), c. 1935 18 x 14 inches 16.125 x 20.125 inches Spanierman Gallery, LLC, New York Collection of the Akron Art Museum Gift of Mrs. Louise Faysash Joe Jones SOUTHERN OHIO MUSEUM AND MUSEUM OF WISCONSIN ART ONLY Industrial Landscape, St. Louis, 1932, 1932 Oil on canvas Raphael Gleitsmann 20 x 28 inches The Brown Gloves, c. 1932 Collection of Michael Lawlor Oil on fiberboard Courtesy Richard Norton Gallery, Chicago 26 x 22 inches MASSILLON MUSEUM ONLY Collection of the Akron Art Museum Henry Keller Gift of Mrs. Louise Faysash At the Vermillion Lagoon, c. 1908 Gouache Raphael Gleitsmann 14.5 x 17 inches Untitled (woman doing wash behind farmhouse) Cleveland Artists Foundation Collection c. 1940 Watercolor and graphite on paper Henry Keller 20 x 24.5 inches William Lee Farm, Berlin Heights, c. 1915 Collection of the Akron Art Museum Oil on board Gift of Mrs. Louise Faysash MASSILLON MUSEUM AND RIFFE GALLERY ONLY 19.5 x 13 inches Cleveland Artists Foundation Collection Raphael Gleitsmann Chateau at Aulnoise, 1946 Albert H. Krehbiel Oil on cardboard Evening Rush Hour in the Chicago Loop, 1926 29.25 x 41.25 inches Oilonboard Massillon Museum Collection 12 x 14 inches Gift of Albert E. Hise Estate of the artist 76.9.16 Courtesy Richard Norton Gallery, Chicago

William Grauer Albert H. Krehbiel Studio Interior, 1930 Michigan Avenue Bridge, c. 1920 Watercolor on paper Oiloncanvas 22 x 30 inches 27 x 34 inches Private Collection Estate of the artist Courtesy of Tregoning & Company, Cleveland Courtesy Richard Norton Gallery, Chicago

Carl Hoeckner Dulah Evans Krehbiel The Yes Machine (The Master of Men), c. 1930 Music, c. 1920 Oil on board Oiloncanvas 29 x 39 inches 36 x 44 inches Collection of Clifford Law Offices, Chicago Estate of the artist Courtesy Richard Norton Gallery, Chicago Courtesy Richard Norton Gallery, Chicago MASSILLON MUSEUM ONLY 116 Lucius Kutchin Romolo Roberti Atalaya–Above Santa Fe, 1936 Roofs, 1934 Oil on canvas Oil on canvas 28 x 30 inches 34 x 30 inches Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Permanent Collection Gift of Ann McElroy Wright in memory of her Western Illinois University Art Gallery parents, Austin and Elizabeth Spahr McElroy Macomb, Illinois 2002.028 Alice Schille Lucius Kutchin Coffee Workers Return, c. 1930–1935 Girl in Green, c. 1930 Watercolor on paper Oil on panel 19.75 x 24.75 inches 35.875 x 28 inches Private Collection Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Courtesy of Keny Galleries, Columbus, Ohio Gift of Miss Stella Milburn 1979.084 Alice Schille In a Mountain Village, Southern France Harold Noecker ca. 1920–1925 Angular Landscape (Division Street), c. 1944 Watercolor on paper Oil on canvas 20.75 x 18.0625 inches 33 x 30 inches Private Collection Collection of John and Susan Horseman Courtesy of Keny Galleries, Columbus, Ohio SOUTHERN OHIO MUSEUM AND MUSEUM OF WISCONSIN ART ONLY Gregory Orloff Vera Mirova, 1927 Alice Schille Oil on canvas Hilltown, c. 1920–1925 40 x 34 inches Watercolor on paper Private Collection 17.25 x 20.25 inches Courtesy Richard Norton Gallery, Chicago Private Collection Courtesy of Keny Galleries, Columbus, Ohio Gregory Orloff MASSILLON MUSEUM AND RIFFE GALLERY ONLY The Chicago World's Fair, 1933 Oil on canvas Willam S. Schwartz 24.5 x 36 inches Mountain Landscape, 1940 Collection of Susan and Gary Garrabrandt Gouache on paper laid on board Courtesy Richard Norton Gallery, Chicago 22 x 30 inches Spanierman Gallery, LLC, New York Arthur Osver Red Ventilator, 1945 William S. Schwartz Oil on masonite Dancing the Blues Away, 1935 29.5 x 24 inches Oil on canvas Collection of John and Susan Horseman 40 x 50 inches Collection of Michael Lawlor Romolo Roberti Courtesy Richard Norton Gallery, Chicago Backyard Alley Scene Chicago, 1932 Oil on canvas board William Sommer 20 x 14 inches Ray in a Red Collar, 1914 Charles S. Hayes Family Collection Oil on canvas 26 x 20 inches Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph M. Erdelac 1995.016

117 William Sommer Howard Thomas Bach Chord, 1923 Jones Island, 1935 Oil on composition board Oil on board 20 x 23.75 inches 20 x 24 inches Collection of the Akron Art Museum Partial Gift of Ann Wall Thomas Gift of Russell Munn in memory of Helen G. Munn Museum of Wisconsin Art Collection

William Sommer Howard Thomas Blue Dairy Cart, 1917–1918 Boat and Turtle, c. 1936 Oil on board Watercolor on paper 16.5 x 23.5 inches 14 x 18 inches Collection of John and Susan Horseman, Partial Gift of Ann Wall Thomas Courtesy of Keny Galleries, Columbus, Ohio Museum of Wisconsin Art Collection

William Sommer Paul B. Travis The Pool, c. 1918 Chartres Cathedral, 1947 Oil on panel Watercolor on paper 80.7 cm x 60 cm 26 x 20 inches Cleveland Museum of Art Collection of the Akron Art Museum Silver Jubilee Treasure Fund, 1945.46 Gift of the estate of Dorothy Van Sickle MASSILLON MUSEUM, RIFFE GALLERY, AND SOUTHERN OHIO MUSEUM ONLY Paul B. Travis Grand Canyon, 1950 William Sommer Watercolor on paper Still Life of Fruit and Flowers, nd 19 x 25 inches Ink and watercolor Dr. and Mrs. Michael Dreyfuss 8.325 x 5.25 inches Massillon Museum Collection Santos Zingale Gift of Albert E. Hise 76.9.16 Farm Near Holy Hill, 1936 Watercolor on paper Lucia Stern 21.5 x 26.5 inches Martinique, 1950 Museum of Wisconsin Art Collection Stitchery and decoupage 24.5 x 34.75 inches Santos Zingale Gift of the Milwaukee Art Museum and Patrick White Station, 1948 and Beatrice Haggerty Museum of Art Oil on masonite panel Museum of Wisconsin Art Collection 1988.012 23.25 x 30.875 inches Milwaukee Art Museum Julia Thecla Gift of Gimbel Bros., Milwaukee Mary in Blue Shoes, 1939 Opaque watercolor, charcoal and graphite 18 x 22 inches Collection of the Illinois State Museum

118 Bibliography

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Adams, Henry. Thomas Hart Benton: Drawing From Donnell, Courtney Graham. Ivan Albright. New York: Life, exh. cat. New York Abbeville Press, 1990. Hudson Hills Press, 1997.

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Applebaum, Stanley. Spectacle in the White City: The Gerdts, William H. Alice Schille. New York: Hudson Chicago 1893 World’s Fair. New York: Calla Editions, Hills Press, 2001. 2009. ______. Art Across America: Two Centuries of Balkan, Debra Bricker. After Many Springs: Regional Painting, 1710–1920. 3 vols. New York: Regionalism, Modernism and the Midwest. Des Abbeville Press, 1990. Moines, Iowa: Des Moines Art Center, 2009 ______. The Color of Modernism: The American Baigell, Matthew. Artist and Identity in Twentieth- Fauves, exh. cat. New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries, Century America. New York: Cambridge University 1997. Press, 2001. Glascock, Patricia. A Place in Time: The Inlander Baigell, Matthew. “Thomas Hart Benton in the Collection of Great Lakes Painting 1913–1958, exh. 1920s.” Art Journal, vol. 29, no. 4 (Summer 1970): cat. Cleveland State University Art Gallery, 1994. 422-429. Green, Martin. New York 1913: The Armory Show and Barton, John Rector. Rural Artists of Wisconsin. the Paterson Strike Pageant. New York: Collier Books, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1948. 1988.

Black, Samuel W. Yet Still We Rise: African American Greenhouse, Wendy, Susan Weininger and Susan C. Art in Cleveland, 1920–1970, exh. cat. Cleveland: Larsen. Chicago Painting 1895 to 1945: The Bridges Cleveland Artists Foundation, 1996. Collection. Springfield, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Butts, Porter. Art in Wisconsin. Madison, Wisconsin: Democrat Printing Company, 1936. Hall, Michael. Painters of the Great Lakes Scene, exh. cat. Traverse City, Michigan: Dennos Museum Cauman, John. Inheriting Cubism: The Impact of Center, 1996. Cubism on American Art 1909–1936, exh. cat. New York: Hollis Taggart Galleries, 2002. Henri, Robert. The Art Spirit. New York: Harper and Row, 1984. (First published 1923). Coen, Rena Neumann. Painting and Sculpture in Minnesota, 1820–1914. Minneapolis: University of Homer, William Inness. Alfred Stieglitz and the Minnesota Press, 1976. American Avant-Garde. Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1977. Cohan-Solal, Annie. Painting American: The Rise of American Artists, Paris 1867 – New York 1948. New ______. Avant-Garde: Painting and Sculpture in York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. America, 1910–1925, exh. cat. Wilmington: Delaware Art Museum, 1975. Corn, Wanda M. The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935. Berkeley: Jeffett, William. Surrealism in America during the University of California Press, 1999. 1930s and 1940s: Selections from the Penny and Elton Yasuna Collection, exh. cat. Saint Petersburg, Cozzolino, Robert. Art in Chicago: Resisting Florida: Salvador Dali Museum, 1999. Regionalism, Transforming Modernism. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 2007. Kendall-Hess, Wendy. The Art of William Sommer. Akron: Akron Art Museum, 1993. Cozzolino, Robert. With Friends: Six Magic Realists, 1940-1965. Madison: Elvehjem Museum of Art, Kennedy, Elizabeth ed. Chicago Modern 1893-1945: University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2005. Pursuit of the New, exh. cat. Chicago: Terra Museum of American Art, 2004. Crunden, Robert M. American Salons: Encounters with European Modernism 1885–1917. New York: ______. The Eight and American Modernism. Chicago: Oxford University Press, 1993. University of Chicago Press, 2009.

119 Keny, James et. al. Triumph of Color and Light: Ohio Ploog, Randy J. and Henry Adams. Manierre Dawson: Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, exh. cat. New Revelations. Chicago: Hollis Taggart Galleries, Columbus, Ohio: Columbus Museum of Art, 1994. 2003.

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120 Acknowledgments This exhibition and publication would not have been possible without the support and encouragement of numerous individuals and institutions. A special thanks goes to the National Endowment for the Arts and their American Masterpieces: Three Centuries of Artistic Genius initiative which provided the financial support for this endeavor.

The Massillon Museum also thanks ArtsinStark for their financial support of the educational components developed in conjunction with the exhibition as well as for its general operating support. Also, thanks to the Ohio Arts Council for its continued support of the exhibitions and programs we provide.

I also must thank William H. Robinson, Curator of Modern European Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, for his dedication to this exhibition and publication. Thanks to our numerous conversations, meetings and brainstorming sessions, the Massillon Museum will once again provide a quality exhibition and publication that highlights a topic that is not often studied in depth.

For their commitment and interest, my gratitude goes to the Massillon Museum Board of Directors. I am especially grateful to Alexandra Nicholis for her assistance and advice from the beginning of this project to its completion; to Jill Malusky for the tireless journeys with me to look at paintings, assist with gathering of information, and overall support; to Margy Vogt for designing the catalog and providing public relations support; to Emily Vigil for assisting with all the loan forms, image requests, and general registrar duties on this exhibition; to Andy Rock, Keith Rock and Chris Ross, for their installation and exhibition support; and to Chris Craft, Scot Phillips, Sandi Thouvenin and Mandy Pond, staff of the Massillon Museum, for their commitment and interest.

For assistance above and beyond the expected, from facilitating loans to researching potential artists, I thank Richard Norton of Richard Norton Gallery, Chicago, Illinois, and James Keny of Keny Galleries, Columbus, Ohio. For encouragement and guidance I thank Susan dePasquale and Ken Emerick at the Ohio Arts Council.

Of course, without the help of researchers and the editor, all of the information would not be properly showcased. I would like to express my appreciation to Jill Malusky, Alexandra Nicholis, Scot Phillips and Emily Vigil for their contributions to the biographical section. Thank you also to Ann and Hugh Brown for their editing assistance.

Additional people were also helpful in gathering research for this project. A thanks to Kara Pollnow, Collections Curator of The John and Susan Horseman Collection; Denise Mahoney, Collection Manager & Research Assistant, Department of American Art at the Art Institute of Chicago; Becky Davis, Registrar and Pat McCormick, Archivist, at the Butler Institute of American Art; Al Muchka, Associate Curator at the Milwaukee Public Museum; Nora Biehle of New York City; Lea Nickless, Special Projects for Micky Wolfson; Sharon Smith Theobald, Senior Appraiser at Appraisal Associates International, LLC; and Leslie Patterson, Reference Librarian, Fine Art, at the Chicago Public Library.

I also would like to thank the people who believed in this project enough to show it at their venues:

At the Riffe Gallery: Mary Gray for her enthusiasm and support from the beginning of the project.

At the Southern Ohio Museum: Sara Johnson and Darren Baker who were also enthusiastic about this exhibition from the start.

At the Museum of Wisconsin Art: Graeme Reed, for his willingness to show the exhibition in West Bend, and to Linda Goetz and Andrea Walla for their research and loan assistance.

To all those who helped make this project a reality, I extend my heartfelt gratitude:

At the Akron Art Museum: Mitchell Kahan, Director; Barbara Tannebaum, Curator; and to Arnold Tunstall, Registrar, for their enthusiasm and assistance.

At the Brauer Museum of Art: Gregg Hertzlieb, Director and Curator, and Gloria Ruff, Registrar and Assistant Curator, for their support from the beginning of this exhibition.

121 At the Cleveland Artists Foundation: Lauren Hansgen, Executive Director, for her prompt agreement to provide loans.

At the Cleveland Museum of Art: C. Griffith Mann, Chief Curator; Mark Cole, Curator of American Art; and Gretchen Shie-Miller, Registrar, for their support and understanding of the importance of this project.

At the Columbus Museum of Art: Nanette Maciejunes, Executive Director; Melissa Wolfe, Curator; and Jennifer Seeds Martin, Registrar, for their enthusiasm, support, and willingness to lend.

At DC Moore Gallery: Heidi Lange, Director, and Ralph Sessions, Director of Special Projects, for their promptness.

At the Illinois State Museum: Bonnie Styles, Director; Carole Peterson, Registrar; and Doug Carr, Museum Photographer, for their enthusiasm and support.

At the Milwaukee Art Museum: Dan T. Keegan, Director; Jane O’Meara, Assistant Registrar; and Stephanie Hansen, Rights and Reproductions, for their support.

At the National Gallery of Art: Alicia B. Thomas, Senior Loan Officer; Judith Cline, Associate Registrar for Loans; and Barbara Wood, Images and Permissions Coordinator for their enthusiasm and assistance.

At the Spanierman Gallery: Ira Spanierman, Director, and Gina Greer, Associate Director, for their enthusiasm and support.

At the Weisman Art Museum: Diane A. Mullin, Associate Curator; Laura Muessig, Registrar for Collections; and Brian Zehowski, Collections Photographer for their support and research assistance.

At the Western Illinois University Art Gallery: John Graham, Curator of Exhibitions for his participation.

For facilitating loans: James Keny and Darlene Cobb at Keny Galleries, Columbus; Richard Norton and Susan Klein at Richard Norton Gallery, Chicago; William Scheele of Kokoon Arts, Cleveland; William Tregoning III of Tregoning & Company, Cleveland; Patti Gilford of Patti Gilford Fine Arts, Chicago; and Michael Wright of Michael Wright Fine Arts, South Bend.

My most sincere appreciation to those art lovers: Frederick Biehle and Erika Hinrichs, Daniel Bush, Michael and Elisabeth Dreyfuss, Lisa and Bruce Fiiles, Charles Hayes, John and Susan Horseman, Susan and Gary Garrabrant, Clifford Law Offices, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr., Michael Lawlor, and other private collectors, who have collected and cherished these paintings and are now so generously lending them to the exhibition. Your willingness to share your art with the public is greatly appreciated.

And lastly, I would like to thank the Massillon community for their encouragement, confidence, help and support over the years.

Christine Fowler Shearer Executive Director

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