THE ART OF WILLIAM SOMMER Reprinted with permission from the Akron Art Museum Akron Art Museum Brochure of the William Sommers Exhibition November 6, 1993 - January 9, 1994 William Sommer, one of the finest artists to emerge from Cleveland's expansive early twentieth-century arts scene, doggedly followed his own path to create an art that transcended the ordinary and that still looks fresh and inviting today. While Sommer (1867-1949) exhibited widely in Ohio and also in New York, London and other major cities during his lifetime, he never gained lasting fame beyond his own region. A philosophical, hard-drinking, impractical man, Sommer lacked the tools and the desire to bring his art to a wider audience. Recent years, however, have seen a renewed interest in his art, not just in Ohio but beyond, as critical reevaluations confirm that Sommer merits further attention and perhaps even consideration as an artist of national stature. Sommer's involvement with art began early in his life. The son of German immigrants, he took art lessons as a young child in his native Detroit from artist and commercial lithographer Julius Meichers. Even at a young age, Sommer's skills were apparent, and Melchers helped Sommer get a coveted apprenticeship in a Detroit commercial lithography studio in 1881. Lithography was a vital art at that time, for it was the primary means for mass production of images before photographic reproduction for commercial use was widespread After completing his apprenticeship in 1 888, lithographic jobs took him to Boston, then New York and England. As his lithographic reputation grew, though, so did his desire to create fine art for himself. Good fortune enabled Sommer to pursue his dream. A fellow lithographer received a windfall and brought Sommer with him to study art in Munich, a city reputed to be a great art center. From February 1890 through March 1891, Sommer studied art there and traveled to Italy and Holland as well He worked primarily with a Professor Herterich, but records suggest additional classes with Ludwig Schmid and the famed Adolph Menzel, an important painter noted for his lifelike domestic and historic scenes.1 In truth, the Munich of 1890 had not been a real art center for some time - that role had been usurped by Paris-but Sommer received a solid education in formal technique and rendering. He came to excel in these skills but learned nothing of Impressionism, which had revolutionized art from the 1 870s onward Sommer's year in Munich was the last formal art education that he ever received. After returning to the U.S., Sommer settled in New York and returned to his commercial lithography. He married Martha Obermeyer in 1894 or 1895, and in 1896 the first of their three sons was born.Throughout this period, Sommer pursued his own art. Working both with oil paints and pastels, he made a number of portraits, predominantly of children, rendered with the broad, gestural strokes and muted earth tones so integral to the Munich aesthetic . He also joined the Kit Kat Klub, a small group of artists who met weekly to talk and sketch. In 1907, Sommer and his young family moved to Cleveland at the request of the Otis Lithograph Company. While at Otis, he met some of Cleveland1s more adventurous artists including his co-worker William Zorach and Zorach1s neighbor Abel Warshawsky, both of whom went on to study in Paris. He spent more time with them through the Kokoon Arts Klub, an artists' group that Sommer co-founded in 1911 to promote interest in modern art.From Warshawsky, Sommer learned the fundamentals of Impressionism - bright, airy palette of pure, unblended colors, applied in short, soft strokes Sommer painted in an impressionist style from about 1910 to about 1912 . From Zorach, Sommer learned of Post-Impressionism as practiced by such artists as Paul Gauguin and Vincent Van Gogh; this influence is readily apparent in the large, rather flat areas of bright color and somewhat simplified forms found in most of Sommer's works of 1913 and 1914.This exposure was furthered by a visit to the 1913 Armory Show, a landmark exhibition of European art featuring every major trend in modern art.5 There, Sommer learned of Matisse and the Fauves, artists who painted vivid scenes that eliminated all depth and much detail, emphasizing instead line and color. This new knowledge was soon reflected in Sommer's art, which began to incorporate vivid, often unnatural colors, energetic lines and extreme flatness. In just a few years, Sommer had absorbed three decades worth of innovation, adopting what he wanted from each style in turn and discarding the rest. In 1914, Sommer moved his family from the Cleveland suburb of Lakewood to a four-acre lot in the Brandywine neighborhood of Northfield Township, roughly mid-way between Cleveland and Akron. This lot had an old frame house, where the family lived, and an abandoned schoolhouse that Sommer converted to a studio. Sommer's happiness in his new surroundings is apparent in the art that he produced in those first years after coming to Brandywine. He created a number of festive watercolor scenes depicting nude or partially-clad women in idyllic settings. The soft, flowing lines, celebratory nature and sensual subject matter of these works revealed a strong debt to the art of Henri Matisse. Sommer's distance from the city did not mean physical or intellectual isolation for him. An intelligent, inquisitive man, he was a voracious reader. Once his interest in the newest artistic developments had been initiated, he kept up with the avant-garde trends by reading art journals obtained at Laukhaff's Bookstore, a meeting place for Cleveland's Bohemians Additionally, his job at Otis brought him into Cleveland during the day and many of his friends came out to the country to visit, so Sommer received the intellectual stimulation of exchanging ideas with other artists and thinkers. This group of friends included artists Philip Kaplan, Carl Moellmann, Richard Sedlon and Ernest Nelson; the architect William Lescaze; and poets Samuel Loveman and the famed Hart Crane. Interests in philosophy, music, literature and a range of other areas led Sommer to read some of the greatest minds of his own and earlier times, thereby gleaning new ideas that could be absorbed into his art. His reading was remarkably diverse, ranging from Feodor Dostoevsky to Sherwood Anderson and from Frederick Nietzsche to the Bhagavad Gita. Music, too, played a role in shaping Sommer's art, inspiring him to visualize specific chords or use colors suggested by the notes. His musical tastes clearly leaned toward the Teutonic, with Bach and Wagner among his favorites; they, too, were incorporated into his work. The artist's delight in his art, reading and music were affected, however, by a growing frustration with his job. This discontent, coupled with Sommer's lifelong problem with alcoholism, sometimes led him to disappear for several days at a time. Nonetheless, Sommer's art continued to evolve as new influences entered his life. Beginning around 1917, he began to add angular lines to his works, often combining them with curving forms. Gradually, the geometric angles and curves grew firmer and more extreme, dominating color as a means of expression in his work. These changes were inspired by Sommer's exposure to Cubism, and even more so, to its British variant, Vorticism. Sommer had seen the Cubist paintings of Picasso and Braque as early as 1913. Yet, these radical works, which fractured three-dimensional subjects by showing different views of the same object simultaneously, affected him only slightly. He embraced the Vorticists' work and doctrine more wholeheartedly, adopting their aesthetic of wildly explosive compositions within solid, static contours by the early 1920s. Through the mid-i 920s, Sommer created a number of expressive, angular paintings that grew increasingly dense in their forms and earthy in their colors. Their expressive, gestural quality and flat, geometric forms revealed the added influence of German Expressionism and Paul Cezanne, whom Sommer revered. Most of these works were rendered in oil paint, and they increasingly depicted those subjects on which Sommer was to focus for the remainder of his career: children, the livestock and scenery of the Brandywine Valley and still lifes. These subjects were all quite conventional compared with the industrial and machine-age imagery of Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth and other major American modernists. Sommer, who was fully aware of their work, preferred to focus on simpler, homier themes. His choice was probably motivated by the love of nature that first drew him to the countryside, and perhaps affirmed by his great love of Cezanne's art, especially the French painter's landscapes and still lifes. Throughout the late teens and into the mid-twenties, Sommer tried to combine the very different influences that he had assimilated and somehow make them coexist comfortably. His efforts culminated with the union of two disparate traditions Sommer blended aspects of Cezanne, the Vorticists and Cubists-all artists who treated subject matter as broken masses existing in space-with the flat, patterned arrangement of lines and colors used by Matisse and the Post-Impressionists. This union was not always a smooth one, and for every success, he also produced works that were heavy, stiff, or lacking cohesion. Somehow, though, out of his struggle to combine these elements with each other and with his own aesthetic, a unique style emerged in the late 1 920s. Sommer perfected this style by using line to shape and define his forms, shifting to the more spontaneous, looser medium of watercolors and relying more upon his strong natural instinct for color and composition.