Clarence J. Bulliet - Commentary on Modern Art

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What’ll We Do With It? An Inquiry into the Future of Modern

Transcribed from The Chicagoan, Vol. 12, No. 7, February 1932, pp.43-44

 

Now that Modern Art has come to town, through the various and devious channels we have discussed during the past six months in these pages, what of it? At a little informal luncheon at the Arts Club, “Modernism’s” Chicago storm center, several weeks ago, three of us who have been in the forefront of the battle for liberalism asked the question of each other. The answer wasn’t very heartening. One of us suggested that perhaps 500 Chicagoans had been “educated into what it is all about” after thirteen years of persistent effort on the part of the Arts Club’s leaders and their allies. The other two of us chorused that the estimate is too high.

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Perhaps it isn’t in the Anglo-Saxon blood to “understand.” London, while trafficking commercially in the “heresy” along with the other European capitals, still takes its heart of hearts portraits that rival the camera for physical accuracy and landscapes wherein cattle can graze and in whose trees birds can sing. Even the Cezannish English heretics, whose chief is Augustus John, never quite got away from “representation” and into the archaic Greek, African and Oriental idea of introspective interpretation that the French and the Germans so readily grasped and improved upon.

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New York and Chicago follow in the footsteps of London, rather than Paris and Munich—not only the American artists, but the American patrons of art. The agitation for “understanding” in Chicago, while it has broken the iron grasp of the czars of taste who came into power with the World’s Fair in 1893, and who used that power mercilessly in protecting the mart for themselves by rigidly excluding youngsters of advanced ideas, has so far substituted nothing satisfactory. The mart, dead for the “old hats,” is not yet born for the liberals.

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Among the 500 we discussed over black coffee, there is a pitifully small percentage of men and women with money to buy, and that percentage is cut into an almost infinitesimal fraction when you exclude the buyers who only buy established French pictures, afraid to to take a chance on the uncertified, particularly in those at their door.

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Lovers of “old hat” art – of sunsets, of moonlights on the ocean, of cows standing knee deep in pasture brooks, of lovely semi-nudes of the French Second Empire, and the like – are afraid, likewise, to buy. They vaguely and uncomfortably feel that there must be something in “Modernism,” though they detest it themselves – something that may mark the collector of these freaks and insanities as “up to date.” They don’t want new things, but neither do they want the old, for fear of being laughed at as old-fashioned.

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In New York, this feeling is being dissipated somewhat. Powerful social leaders are taking up the “Moderns”—the milder ones. It is becoming fashionable over there to own a Kuhn or a Karfiol or a James Chapin or some other, to the number of about twenty-five. Propaganda has reached such proportions that these can hang on their walls as safely as could once a Murphy or a Chase or an Inness.

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Chicago has not yet arrived at that delectable pass, and will not until voices of authority, backed by money, begin to speak and speak forcibly and often. What have we here for the voices and the money to work on? When Julius Meier-Graefe, foremost of living art critics, visited Chicago in 1928 on a tour of America in search of what some New York art dealers fondly hoped might be “discoveries” that could be turned into money (Meier-Graefe “discovered” El Greco for this generation, fixed Cezanne's place in the hall of fame, and is now engaged on canonizing Picasso) an “Exhibition of Chicago Moderns” was arranged by Chicago's radical leaders with the little gallery of "Neo-Arlimusc,” which Rudolph Weisenborn was instrumental in founding after leaving the No-Jury society. The idea was to gather all the significant paintings and pieces of sculpture the Chicago Moderns had done since the Armory shows. But the time was too short and the artists were too widely scattered to carry through to complete success.

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However, this show, despite several works of little significance rushed in at the last minute to fill out, was the best that has been staged so far, for the voices and the money to work on. Eliminating the inconsequential, these dozen artists were represented: Stanislas Sukalkski, Rudolph Weisenborn, Salcia Bahnc, Emil Armin, Ramon Shiva, A. L. Pollack, Todros Geller, Karl Hoeckner, Raymond Katz, Jean Crawford Adams, Helen West Heller, and Paul A. Florian Jr., among the painters, and their sculptors: Tennessee Mitchell Anderson, Carl Hallstammer and Tud Kempf. Raymond Johnson, Frances Grey, Gustav Dalstrom, Katherine Dudley, George Josimovich, Beatrice S. Levy, Ralph Erbaugh and Frances Strain might well have graced the list, and since then Rifka Angel has come to town from New York by way of Moscow and Macena Barton has laid aside the cap and gown of her school days and become a painter to be reckoned with Meier-Graefe went back to his native Germany without news of any phenomenal genius in Chicago. But then New York fared little better, the water colorist, John Marin, alone arousing any interest in accredited quarters for his critical faculties.

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These Chicagoans average very well with the New Yorkers for talent, but they lag in fame and, in some instances, in fortune, because Chicago picture dealers have been slower in taking up their cause than the painting merchants along Fifty-seventh Street, and they have had little “national publicity” in the magazines, whose home offices are mostly in New York and whose western horizon is bounded by the Hudson river. Nor, as yet, have Chicago society leaders thought it fit to take them up and fight for or over them. Of a number of these local artists of exceptional talent we have already spoken at length in relating “how modern art came to town.” Weisenborn: it will be recalled, was a prime organizer of the “run-away show” and of No-Jury, and long No Jury’s president. He is now painting, and teaching others how to paint. His chief lieutenant of old days, Raymond Johnson, has been painting for many years in the deserts of the west, and was in Chicago only this January with a show of his highly colored, geometrical abstractions at Increase Robinson’s Studio gallery.

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Sukalksi was the colony’s picturesque “bad boy” during the war years, as we have related; Helen West Heller named the No-Jury society, and is one of the most faithful and most talented of the group; Carl Hoeckner, another veteran, paints mystically and socially, his The Home Coming from war being one of the most powerful canvases in the Neo-Arlimusc show; Beatrice S. Levy was one of the dissenters from the group of Art Institute students back in the Armory show days, who tried “Henry Hair-Mattress” for his art crimes; Jean Crawford Adams, Frances Strain, Francis Foy and Gustaf Dalstrom have all been prominent in the furthering of the No-Jury movement.

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Of the Chicagoans who are in our picked group, Salcia Bahne has been the most fortunate in winning both recognition and a wide distribution of her pictures. A student of Sukalksi, she attracted attention for herself first by some expert paintings on silk in “primitive” style. Later she developed into a painter of female nudes, suggestive of both Cezanne and Rubens, and in this epoch, she did some remarkable Biblical characters. Lot’s Daughters, Judith and The Shulamite. She became, too, a successful painter of portraits in a vigorous style. Her fame has spread to France, where she has been living and painting for the past three years. Her commercial success has been due largely to the fact that the Chester Johnson galleries have taken up her work and pushed it vigorously. Salcia Bahnc is a Polish-Jewess, of the European family of Van Ast that has given artists to the world in other generations.

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Rifka Angel is a tiny Russian-Jewess, formerly a dance in New York and a model for painters and sculptors of dancing figures. Very much alive to everything that is going on around her, Rifka, like Suzanne Valadon mother of Utrillo, learned to paint watching the artists from her model stand. She is Chicago’s most talented “primitive,” doing persons and animals and even buildings and trees with a droll understanding, filtered through the temperament of a dancing sprite. Rifka, too, is assembling a little group of collectors of her paintings, having had two successful shows at the Chicago establishment of Knoedler.

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ANOTHER “primitive” of exceptional talent is Pollack, an elderly clothing salesman, likewise Jewish, who started painting in earnest only after he was fifty. Of crude talent technically, Pollack displayed an uncanny feeling for fundamentals and a power of visualizing his ideas. His Stock Yards is the most successful transcription yet made to canvas of the spirit of Chicago’s great slaughterhouse. He did also a Crucifixion that was startling among the millions the artists have been doing in the past nineteen hundred years, centering the attention on the railing thief. Pollack is a “discovery” of Weisenborn’s, who gave him his first show at Neo-Arlimusc. For the past two or three years he has been in New York, a “village” figure.

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Still another “primitive,” of a wholly different type from either of the preceding, is Ralph Erbaugh, who does strange, uncanny, unheard-of things with color, sometimes using house paint. His pictures have dream qualities suggestive of such opposites as Zak and Henri Rousseau, though partaking of neither. Erbaugh loves violent colors splashed against colors as violent, but the resulting picture is generally static, the colors working out a peculiar harmony of their own instead of clashing violently. Erbaugh is wholly untutored, wholly spontaneous.

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Ramon Shiva is the most expert colorist working in Chicago, and his resulting pictures are comparable for both skill and inspiration with anything that is shown by the New York group. Shiva is a Spaniard who came to Chicago, a youth, about the time of the Armory show. He had already had the best of technical schooling in Spain. He became here a color grinder by profession, and he is a master of the paint he mixes. He works generally on large canvases, and his resulting pictures have frightened admirers, who might be tempted to buy, by their size and by the fact that he is a very daring painter of the nude. Shiva probably leads the Chicago group in the technical perfection of his art, and it is not a technique that deadens.

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TODROS GELLER is a Jew immensely learned in the pictorial lore of his race from the days of Aaron’s golden calf to the days of Chagall. His learning is reflected in his paintings and his woodcuts. He has sojourned for months at a time in Palestine and in the ghettos of Europe, studying the Jews both socially and artistically. Geller is so talented as an artist as to be worthy, perhaps, of designation as an American Chagall—only a Chagall in serious mood, profoundly racial, as the great Russian often is. Lighter in touch in something of the same strain is Raymond Katz, who is also a satirist known in this mood to readers of THE CHICAGOAN under the designation “Sandor.” Emil Armin is also strongly racial in his feeling, although he is most successful with simpler, more rustic types. When he paints priestly grandeur, it is rather with a feeling of childish awe than with the understanding of Geller, wise as the Rabbi himself. Armin is classed among our “primitives,” but he resembles Van Gogh rather than Rousseau.

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Paul A. Florian, Jr., is a one-picture artist, so far as Chicago knows him from exhibitions. Head of an advertising agency, he painted Two Nudes and sent it to the No-Jury show in 1927, on a bet. It was the first picture he had painted since the outbreak of the world war, which interrupted his art studies. It was the sensation of the show and had the further distinction of being removed from the walls by policewomen in a raid, when five other canvases suffered a similar fate. Florian’s canvas was harmless enough in the technicalities police usually look for, being little more than a black and a white silhouette. But it had “temperament,” akin to Beardsley or Alastair. It later was shown unmolested in the Neo-Arlimusc group arranged for Meier-Graefe.

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George Josimovich is a violent extremist, a Cubist for a while and now painter of nudes that frighten into spasms the “old hats” who have schooled themselves to look without blanching on the figures of the French “Moderns.” Josimovich resembles rather the German Expressionists in his truculence. The latest arrival among the distinguished talents of Chicago is Macena Barton. She is from Michigan, of remote English ancestry, and is a graduate and post-graduate of the Art Institute school, and yet despite all this staid “background” she has turned out a challenging individualist. She has a sort of demoniacal bravery in the presence of color, taking the longest chances with the most barbaric pigments, and usually winning out. Her severe academic training has given her a control that would otherwise result in a wild dance of frenzied hues. She is a painter, generally, of portraits and of nudes—of late, for the latter, she has used negro models as being more highly tinted and working more harmoniously against the backgrounds she loves.

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The late Tennessee Mitchell Anderson was leader of Chicago’s Modern sculptors. Possessor of an impish sense of humor, her sculptured portraits resolved themselves usually into caricatures, many of them with a satiric sting. Mrs. Anderson was lacking in technical skill, a lack she was rapidly overcoming at the time of her mysterious death alone in her apartment, where she lay nearly a week before being found.

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Carl Hallsthammar, a sculptor in wood, has become nationally known for his figures, which also are humorous, but with kindlier fun. Though Swedish by birth, Hallsthammar’s drollery resembles that of Dickens and the English. He is more subtle and less grotesque than the continentals. Hallsthammar of late has been doing a series of serious portraits on wooden panels, of which Lincoln and Edison are completed, and Washington well under way. Tud Kempf, another carver of wood, is a distortionist, sometimes doing amazing things, elongated, attenuated bodies, suggested by the grain of the wood. Kempf is one of the most picturesque figures of the “colony.” He is a master of ballyhoo, one summer showing his things in a tent at an amusement park. But, with all that, he is serious in his intent, and sometimes does something really worthwhile sculpturally.

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THESE are, to my way of thinking, and after going carefully through the No-Jury and other lists and recalling the many personal contacts with artists during the past seven years, the most promising the Chicago scene affords. All of them deserve to have done for them what the commercial galleries and the society leaders of New York are doing for the Gothamites. No giants, granted, of international stature, but there are no colossi in New York either. Some valiant and laudable attempts are being made by the artists to help themselves, but all history indicates that help must come, too, from the outside. It is good exercise to attempt to lift yourself by your bootstraps, but really to ascend, the laws of gravity decree an external boost.

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We have both money and society in Chicago. Who’ll put ’em to work?