Palette and Chisel Club

Since the late nineteenth century, Chicago’s cultural life has been enriched by the activities of several artists’ organizations. Among these groups, the Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine Arts, founded over one hundred years ago, is the oldest still in existence. Today the organization, which is headquartered in the Gold Coast, offers studio time and courses, and it organizes exhibitions for artists and amateurs whose work is realist in style. Because the artists associated with the academy are artistically conservative, the Palette and Chisel’s exhibitions and programs exist outside the sphere of the high art world, and the important contributions the academy made to Chicago’s artistic life in the early years of the twentieth century are unfortunately largely forgotten. Yet the opportunities for exhibition and study it has provided to its membership have had significant impact on the early careers of many artists who later achieved prominence both in Chicago and on a national level. The club’s history is fascinating, for it began as a student organization, matured into a period of progressiveness and influence, and finally, by the mid-twentieth century, became a institution whose members were traditionalists in their artistic preferences.

The Palette and Chisel Club, as it was originally called, was founded on November 13, 1895. Ten students, who were enrolled in the evening classes of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, gathered at the instigation of sculptor Charles Mulligan, an assistant in Lorado Taft’s studio.[1] The charter members were Richard Boehm, Arnold Bunch, Walter Coakley, Curtis Gandy, David Hunter, Henry Hutt, Wilson Henry Irvine, Fred T. Larson, Charles J. Mulligan, and Frank U. Wagner, artists who, with the exception of Irvine, are largely unknown today. The men, who had full-time jobs, were frustrated by their inability to attend the school’s daytime life classes, when natural light made it possible to do color work. Pooling their resources, they hired a model and met the following Sunday in the studio of Arnold Bunch. They began meeting regularly on Sunday mornings, working from nine a.m. until two p.m. After the initial sessions at Bunch’s studio, the group persuaded Lorado Taft, through the efforts of Mulligan, to allow them to sublet his studio in the Athenaeum Building.[2] When the school year ended, the group arranged a series of sketching and painting trips for the spring and summer of 1896, a practice that would continue well into the 1920s. Showing a business acumen that would distinguish the club throughout its history, members financed the trips by convincing three local railroad companies to pay their fares in exchange for borrowing the resulting paintings to use as advertisements for the various locations at which the artists had stayed along the train routes.[3]

The success of these informal arrangements and the increasing number of members led the group to organize on more official terms in the fall of 1896, and they drew up a constitution and elected four officers to one-year positions.[4] Membership in the club was limited to thirty white men over the age of eighteen who possessed both artistic ability and good moral character; twenty-eight names were listed in the first membership roll. Article two of the constitution stated that

The object of this association shall the promotion and education of its members in the art of drawing, painting and modeling.

To furnish at a minimum cost; suitable quarters and models for the members during the winter season and arrange by every means possible for the advancement of the work during the summer. To give exhibitions of work as they shall from time to time propose.[5]

The by-laws stipulated that prospective members had to be sponsored by two members and approved by two-thirds of the membership to be admitted to the club. Dues were set at one dollar per month between October and May, and fifty cents per month from June through September. The initiation fee was three dollars. The club also created an honorary membership category for “artists of high rank” and for those who were in a position to help the association “in the pursuance of its objects.” This membership category, which was restricted from participating in the governance of the club, attested to club members’ desire to cultivate relationships with influential artists and local art patrons as a means of both building a patron base and establishing the club’s credibility.

The organization viewed its primary role as helping members develop their technique rather than as advocating a specific style or medium. Thus, members, who included painters, sculptors, and graphic artists, were free to work in any manner they chose. As a result of this policy, through the 1920s the club attracted diverse artists who had in common a desire to have more opportunities to attend life classes and participate in exhibitions. In the early years of the club, the opportunities the club provided were particularly helpful to a membership of “outsiders”: because many club members were commercial artists, they often found themselves on the outskirts of the artistic elite. The club thus served as an important source of support and validation.[6]

The club quickly became known for bohemian entertainments that included members in drag performing in the original opera spoofs Il Janitore and Carmine, and a “Hobo Pink Tea” on New Year’s Eve 1897, to which Lorado Taft and Charles Francis Browne were invited. The light-heartedness with which members approached artistic study as well as the social events, which tended towards burlesque, led some early critics not to take the club seriously. One writer, in discussing the Hobo Pink Tea commented disparagingly, “The Palette and Chisel Club is composed of artists—that is, there are some artists in it and others who think they are artists.”[7]  The club, perceived as a student organization during the 1890s, was commended by another writer not for the caliber of members’ work, but because it was “the only solvent art organization that gets along with everyone.”[8]

By 1897, club had established a Thursday night lecture series at which both club members and distinguished artists such as Charles Francis Browne and Edgar Cameron spoke.[9] Lectures occasionally focused on non-western art, such as A. E. Haydon’s lecture on the art of India in 1906.[10] Another popular event that was initiated in the 1890s was the cigar “smoker,” which often honored a visiting artist. The club scored a major coup on December 12, 1897, when William Merritt Chase gave a short lecture and critiqued members’ work at a smoker. Guests that evening, who included Lorado Taft, Charles Francis Browne, Ralph Clarkson, and J. C. and F. X. Leyendecker, signed the “log book,” the club’s official scrapbook.[11] Other distinguished speakers who were entertained at smokers and other social events over the years included John Vanderpoel, Alphonse Mucha, Art Institute president William M. R. French, George Bellows, and Joseph Pennell.[12] Not surprisingly, given the number of illustrators in the club, members appear to have been especially enthusiastic about Mucha’s visit and campaigned to have the artist direct a class.[13] Club records do not indicate whether such a class ever occurred.

In 1898, the Palette and Chisel Club organized its first exhibition. In keeping with club members’ tendency not to take themselves too seriously, the show, called “Salon de Refuse,” was a lighthearted parody of the Art Institute of Chicago’s annual Chicago and Vicinity exhibition. It opened at the Club’s quarters on the seventh floor of the Athenaeum Building on February 12, 1898, and featured caricatures of works that had been included in the Art Institute’s exhibition. The Salon de Refuse garnered some attention from the local papers, as well as a tongue-in-cheek review by Theodore Phillips in Brush and Pencil, a Chicago-based art journal.[14] The club raised enough money from admissions to the exhibition that they announced their intention of giving prize money each year to one member for study in Europe. Exhibitors in the Salon de Refuse included portraitist Antonin Sterba, The Wizard of Oz illustrator W. W. Denslow, genre painter Walter Marshall Clute, and landscape painter Wilson Henry Irvine.[15] The club organized a second Salon de Refuse in 1899 as a fund raiser, concluding the show with an auction.[16]

In an article about the club that appeared in the April 1898 issue of Brush and Pencil, member Frank Holme described the club as a study organization, rather than a student one, and noted that sound finances had been “imperative” in the club’s success.[17] At the time of writing, the active membership had increased to thirty-five, and there was a waiting list. Dues had gone up to one dollar and fifty cents per month from October through May, and to seventy-five cents per month from June through September.[18] Holme wrote that the club’s financial stability was due to its adherence to “business principles”: members who were delinquent in paying dues were first fined and then dropped after two months, and the three dollar initiation fee from the replacement member covered the dues deficit.[19] That year, the club was incorporated under the authority of the state of Illinois. 

The Club’s careful financial stewardship enabled members to award a twenty-five dollar prize to Lorado Taft for his sculpture, Despair, shown in the 1899 Chicago and Vicinity exhibition.[20] Since the membership sublet its studio from Taft during their early years, the award suggests that they may have wished not only to honor Chicago’s leading sculptor, but also to maintain as cordial a relationship as possible with their landlord. Records do not indicate how long the arrangement with Taft continued. The club is known to have leased space in the Athenaeum on its own later.

The Club’s first serious exhibition opened on November 24, 1902 at Marshall Field’s Galleries and was the first of its annual juried shows of members’ work. One of only three annual exhibitions to be held at a venue other than club headquarters, it included work by Irvine, Sterba, Max Grundlach, and Clute. Critics were generally positive about the club’s early shows. Characteristic was local artist and critic James Pattison’s review of the 1903 exhibition, which was generally good, although he commented on the preponderance of landscape paintings.[21] A notable exception to the favorable reviews came from progressive critic Harriet Monroe, who described the work in the fourth annual exhibition as largely “amateurish.”[22]

Membership continued to grow as the Palette and Chisel Club entered the twentieth century. By the time of the 1903 exhibition, there were fifty active members, seventeen associate members, and eight honorary members. The following year, the club was reported to be considering raising its membership cap from fifty-five to sixty-five in response to the number of applicants who had remained on the waiting list for some time.[23] The opportunity to have studio time with a model was clearly one that met the needs of many young artists.

In 1906, as a means of generating income for both members and the club, the Palette and Chisel opened a permanent exhibition gallery in which work by members, available for purchase was on view continuously.[24] As with its other ventures, this too was successful, and the gallery generated enough revenue to allow the club to increase the size of its quarters, remodel, and redecorate by the end of the year.[25]

The fifth annual exhibition of members’ work, held from November 26 until December 8, 1906, was the subject of a lengthy article in Brush and Pencil in which the reviewer likened club members’ perpetual desire for study and self-improvement to a former motto of the Salmagundi Club: “It is better to have died than to have arrived.”[26]  Sales from the exhibition were strong, with a large percentage of the ninety canvases in the exhibition selling within two weeks.[27] Notable among the exhibitors that year was Hardesty Maratta, developer of a special pre-mixed palette that was later popular with artists such as Robert Henri, John Sloan and George Bellows, who submitted a landscape painting. Maratta, who appears to have been a club member only briefly, spoke to members about color theory that year and was the subject of a caricature in Log Book Two of the club’s summer outing at their new permanent campsite in Fox Lake, Illinois.[28]

The annual exhibitions, the events honoring distinguished artists, and the growing ranks of members were all indications that the Palette and Chisel Club was maturing into an organization of influence in Chicago. Club activities were reported in the local papers with increasing frequency. When members announced their intention of focusing on the Chicago cityscape that summer as a way to promote the beauties of the city, the news made the front page of the Chicago Tribune.[29] Their decision to work in Brown County, Indiana, during the summers of 1909 and 1910, during the early years of that art colony was also considered newsworthy.[30]

In 1910, the club’s expanding programs and membership necessitated revisions to the constitution and by-laws.[31] The original objective of holding exhibitions “from time to time” was changed to state that the club would organize “at least two exhibitions annually.” Three new objectives were added that reflected activities in which the club had already been engaged for some years:

• To entertain prominent artists visiting Chicago.

• To take active interest in improving the artistic conditions of the City of Chicago.

• To take active interest in movements of national importance to art.

Membership was limited to one hundred active members, and applicants were required to submit three works of art for members’ review. The works were prominently posted for the evaluation of all active members, and prospective members could be rejected by a mere three dissenting votes. The club maintained the associate and honorary membership categories and added a life membership category that had a one-time payment of one hundred dollars. The life membership category was directed towards both men and women of influence, and members included Stanley McCormick, Martin Ryerson, J. J. Glessner, and Frank G. Logan. Classes, as described in the constitution, now included a Tuesday night composition class, and members had access to the studio during other times of the week.[32] The initiation fee for active members was ten dollars, and monthly dues had increased to two dollars, year-round.

By the time of the 1910 revised constitution, the club’s exhibition program had expanded considerably to include both one-man shows and an annual show of “illustrative and commercial art.” This new annual event, created in response to the high number of commercial artists in the membership, reflected the club’s goal of promoting awareness and developing appreciation among the public for illustration, graphic design, and other forms of applied art.[33]

In 1913, the club began awarding a prize for the best work in the annual fine art exhibition; Victor Higgins received the first gold medal, a painting entitled Marketplace at Bruges.[34] The club had also begun publishing a monthly newsletter, named The Cow Bell after the bell used to call meetings to order, in 1912. In addition to reporting on club and members’ activities, The Cow Bell also reported on other art news in Chicago.

The Club’s evolution into one of Chicago’s major art organizations was made official in 1914, when mayor Carter Harrison appointed Higgins as the Club’s representative on the newly formed Commission for the Encouragement of Local Art. This seven-member city commission was charged with purchasing work by local artists for a new municipal art collection. The other appointees included three representatives from the Art Institute of Chicago, one from the Municipal Art League, one from the Friends of American Art, and one selected by the mayor.[35] Members served a four-year term of appointment. By the end of the year, the commission had purchased thirteen works for a sum of $2,500.[36] Higgins wrote in the February 1915 edition of The Cow Bell that the new ordinance “should be heralded with joy, not only by the artists, but by other idealists as well, for is it not logical to believe that this appropriation from the general funds by a city of a sum of money for this purpose will help to crystallize a not entirely vague understanding that art is a necessity to the complete development of any community?”[37]

Another important development that occurred during the second decade of the twentieth century was club members’ new interest in modern art. An undated article that appeared in the Chicago Record-Herald in 1913 (presumably after the Armory Show exhibition had increased the Chicagoan’s awareness of European avant-garde art movements) reported that the club was forming a committee of six or seven members to provide free advice to collectors interested in purchasing art at local galleries: “Not only will this committee be placed at the service of those who contemplate purchasing masterpieces to prevent 30-cent chromo being sold for $5,000, but it also will endeavor to interpret futurist and cubist painting into English.”[38] Later that same year, the work of former Chicago resident David Robinson, described as a “futurist” painter, was on view in the club’s gallery.[39]

In 1915, the progressive element that had been developing within the membership reached its peak with the Palette and Chisel Club’s first and only abstract exhibition, which opened on May 17, 1915. Approximately one-quarter of club members submitted forty-two works to one of the first non-objective exhibitions in the city since the Armory Show. An important catalyst in members’ interest in organizing the exhibition appears to have been the return of member Samuel Kennedy from Paris in 1914. Kennedy, credited by newspaper reviewers as one of the leaders of the “Abstractists,” as club members called themselves, had exhibited pointillist works at the club gallery in December 1914.[40] The Abstractists appear to have organized rapidly, for the first mention of either them or the show appeared in The Cow Bell during the month in which the exhibition opened.[41] In addition to Kennedy, the other leaders of the group were John E. Phillips, an artist and illustrator, and Higgins.[42] Higgins was quoted in a newspaper article as saying that the group had created a ‘symphonic color’ school of art that had “no relationship to cubist or futurist art.”[43]

Among those who participated in the exhibition were John H. Carlsen, club president Richard Victor Brown, Walter Ufer, Joseph Kleitsch, J. Jeffrey Grant, and Albert Ullrich, artists who were also continuing to create realist work, including paintings included in the annual exhibition that spring.[44] Although the work in the abstract exhibition was non-objective, for the most part the artists appear to have created paintings that directly interpreted specific events and music through the decorative arrangement of shapes and colors, rather than from a true understanding of the principles of abstraction.  Thus, Victor Higgins’s painting, The President’s Message, was the artist’s interpretation of a speech President Wilson had made to the Germans.[45]  Nonetheless, the group appears to have been sincere in their intention to voice a fresh and vigorous message through the medium of rhythmic color and line….They anticipate a warm response by the public; an immediate response to their conviction that art must ever present vital thought; that art is justifiable only when it is more than a slavish copying of natural objects.[46]

A follow-up article that appeared in the June edition of The Cow Bell also supports this reading of the artists’ goal of creating aesthetically pleasing, modern work:

These painters are not protesting against any sincere effort, past or present, rather against the patent crudities, negligible design and disagreeable color affected by the various ‘ists, post, neo, etc., as revealed in past exhibitions. It is an effort toward greater freedom of imaginative design, opposed to the naturalistic, and being so, at once permits the full range of palette experimentation; in short, to broaden the painter’s field rather than narrow it.[47]

Reviews of the exhibition were mostly positive, with several reporters finding the work humorous rather than shockingly modern. One writer who previewed the exhibition described the work as “futurist,” and noted that it presented “not ideas, but thought harmonies, soul tones and notes sounded by the vibrant emotions.”[48] President Brown was quoted as saying that members were utterly serious and sane in our aim to futurize art in Chicago. Art does not consist of photographic depictions of things and objects. Art is the expression of feeling, of intimate emotions rather than intimate objects. We are aiming to express on canvas what the musician expresses in his interpretation of melody. And we believe that eventually Chicago will renounce that form of art, which is already surpassed by the camera, so far as faithful portrayal of exterior composition is concerned.[49]

The Club announced that attendance at the show was the best of any exhibition it had organized to date. Intending to build on its success, members planned a second abstract show for the following year, but records indicate that it did not occur.[50] The Abstractists’ desire to create color symphonies in their work found an interesting correspondence in three musical compositions created by Chicago violinist and composer Isadore Berger as interpretations of paintings by Carlsen, Phillips, and Kleitsch. Berger first performed the compositions at the opening of the exhibition and conducted the American Symphony in a performance the following year.[51]

The Palette and Chisel Club did not again explore modern art so publicly, but there were indications of continued interest. In late 1915, Ralph Helm Johnson, an advocate of “dictation art,” spoke in Chicago at the behest of local followers. Johnson’s method was to read a poem or prose passage to artists who then freely interpreted the passage as they liked. A local reviewer noted that Johnson’s system attracted the club’s attention:

Palette and Chisel Club members who thought they had stepped several decades into the future when they gave their ‘abstractist’ exhibit several months ago admitted they had been distanced when they saw some of the pictures painted from dictation and immediately arranged to take the course. They propose to give an exhibit as soon as they become far enough advanced in the new art.”[52]

Again, the report suggests that while club members had a genuine interest in non-objective art, their understanding of the theories of artists such as Picasso and Kandinsky was limited.

While the Palette and Chisel Club was preparing for the abstract exhibition, it also gave one of its most notorious entertainments. Held on April 30, 1915, “Tableaux Vivants” was the subject of numerous newspaper articles.[53] Nude models posed under gauze and colored lights within a large picture frame that encompassed the stage. Club members proclaimed their belief in the beauty of the human form in two more activities that year, an exhibition of nude book plates lent by collector Leroy T. Goble, and a life modeling class held in the woods at Fox Lake.[54] Newspapers in Pittsburgh and St. Louis, as well as the local papers, reported these “Bohemian” activities and discussed the condemnation the club had received from the clergy and other shocked citizens.[55]

With these remarkable series of exhibitions and events, the Palette and Chisel Club had become part of the more progressive part of the art community. They also received the ultimate recognition from the art establishment in 1916, when The Art Institute of Chicago was the site of their twentieth-anniversary exhibition. In keeping with its championship of both the fine and design arts, the club included work from both fields in the exhibition.[56] The anonymous author of the exhibition catalogue praised the club for its success in meeting the needs of its members, fostering the public’s interest in the arts, and linking local art movements to those elsewhere. He commented that “every art center of the world now recognizes the organization as a generous, vital, and intelligent body.”[57] A newspaper critic concurred with this assessment, noting that the club had evolved from a “semi-amateur group of men who painted for pleasure and met informally to enjoy art rather than to adopt it as a profession,” to “an efficiency most influential among the painters of the middle West.”[58]

The club’s position in the community was further strengthened when five of the six prizes awarded at the Chicago and Vicinity exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago were given to members that year. The artists who won awards were Wilson Henry Irvine, Carl Krafft, E. Martin Hennings, Victor Higgins, and Rudolph Ingerle.[59]

Finally, 1916 also saw the organization of several traveling exhibitions, an activity that does not seem to have continued beyond that year. The club had exhibitions at the public library in Lexington, Kentucky, an exhibition sponsored by the Peoria Society of Allied Arts at the public library in Peoria, Illinois, and in St. Louis in exchange for an exhibition of work by St. Louis artists. Walter Ufer, Edgar Payne and Carl Krafft spearheaded these efforts.

The club’s progressive spirit during these years prompted two artists who would become important Chicago modernists to become members, albeit briefly: Rudolph Weisenborn and Ramon Shiva. Weisenborn’s name first appeared in the 1918 annual exhibition, to which he submitted a painting entitled An Abstraction of Spring.[60] In 1919, he planned to exhibit a painting entitled Ruth. Weisenborn left abruptly before the opening of the 1919 exhibition, however, over a jurying dispute. As a juror for the exhibition, he had rejected a painting entitled Autumn by A. G. Rider, which he felt was not finished. When the club overruled his decision, Weisenborn resigned, as did Shiva.[61] The incident is particularly interesting since Weisenborn later became one of the leaders of the No-Jury Society, a group that displayed all submitted artwork without preferential treatment and regardless of quality. Shiva appears to have harbored some hard feelings, for he later refused to do an interview for the club’s newsletter. Members finally were able to get him to give one by hiring a local reporter to interview him.[62]

In 1920, the Palette and Chisel Club began a fund-raising campaign to purchase a permanent home. Among other activities, the club hosted a show in which one hundred paintings were available for a purchase price of one hundred dollars each, with one hundred percent of sales going to the club. Efforts to raise enough money were successful, and in 1921, the club moved into a late-nineteenth century mansion located at 1012 North Dearborn Street. The building included space for an exhibition gallery, etching room, lounge, billiard room, grill, library, reception rooms, sleeping quarters for distinguished visitors, and a large studio on the top floor. Members made the down payment on the building without resorting to any loans from patrons, thus ensuring the organization’s continued autonomy.[63] In addition to these spacious quarters, the summer camp at Fox Lake had expanded to include a clubhouse that could accommodate up to seventy-five members at a time.

For the club, the 1920s were a time of transition as the organization gradually moved away from the active interest in modernism that had marked the period of 1913 to 1919. This change in taste and members’ conflicting viewpoints about contemporary art and progressive art groups are evident in the articles that appeared in the club’s monthly newsletter during these years. They appear to have been more open-minded about local progressive art groups than they were about modern art. Thus, in the November 1923 issue, an editorial urged members to participate in the exhibitions of the No-Jury Society, an organization led by some of the most progressive artists in the city. The anonymous author regretfully wrote that only four active members and five former members of the Palette and Chisel Club had submitted work for the exhibition and noted that the lack of interest “must be conceded a most lamentable failure to grasp an opportunity.”[64]

In the same issue, another unknown author grappled with whether Cubism had any artistic merit and concluded that it did not: “I will merely say that I think I might get somewhat nearer to an understanding of such Cubist pictures as those of Picasso if they were either one thing or the other; that is, I should find it easier to like them if they were sheer abstraction or sheer representation.”[65]

In 1924, a similar sentiment was voiced by another member, who, in discussing the future of abstraction, commented, “The things they paint are so funny and their attitude so ridiculously serious, that the laugh is inevitable, and inevitably they must clown themselves into oblivion.”[66] By this time, those members who, while working within a more academic tradition, had shown a genuine interest in modern art—Victor Higgins, Walter Ufer, Joseph Kleitsch—had moved away, and there seemed to have been no young artists who were equally interested in modernism.

In the 1920s, The Palette & Chisel regularly reported on local exhibitions, including those of the No-Jury Society, the Chicago Society of Artists, and the Illinois Academy of Fine Arts. Especially noteworthy were two articles that appeared regarding Neo-Arlimusc, the avant-garde society organized by Rudolph Weisenborn with the purpose of uniting the literary, visual and musical arts. The reviewer of Neo-Arlimusc’s 1928 retrospective exhibition generally liked it, commenting on the “creditable work” by lesser-known artists and mentioning that some members of the Palette and Chisel club had participated.[67]

Yet despite these instances of interest in progressive art movements, the club was becoming increasingly traditional. In 1925, the club supported conservative Tribune art critic Eleanor Jewett’s position regarding the appropriateness of including Ivan Meštrović’s Crucifix in an exhibition at The Art Institute of Chicago. This modernist sculpture  was a point of contention between Jewett and the pro-modernist art critic Clarence J. Bulliett, then writing for The Chicago Evening Post’s Magazine of the Art World.[68] The author of the article, C.H.C., agreed with Jewett’s position that the sculpture was a monstrosity and concluded, “We never could see anything so very wonderful in the piece of statuary referred to and are of the opinion that whoever abated it is entitled to credit….A studio is one thing, an exhibition gallery is another.”[69]

The club’s negative view of modern art movements was well known in the art community during these years and caused one critic to characterize the organization as “a hot-bed of conservatism.”[70] The club indignantly fought this description, reminding members in an editorial that many current and former members were part of the “independent” movement in Chicago, including Gordon Saint Clair, Ramon Shiva, Rudolph Weisenborn, Julian MacDonald, Carl Hoeckner, and Walter Ufer. Despite this avowal, most of the listed artists were no longer members, and while the author claimed that former members had remained on friendly terms with the Palette and Chisel Club, the difficulty with which they secured the interview with Shiva suggests otherwise. Finally, the editorial made no mention of the abstract exhibition, an omission that has been repeated by the Palette and Chisel over the years to the extent that today the show has been forgotten both by the club and in the art history of Chicago.[71]

Judging by the decreasing number of press clippings that were included in the Club’s log books, few critics were reviewing the club’s annual exhibitions by the end of the 1920s.[72] One anonymous reviewer of conservative taste, however, approvingly described the 1930 annual exhibition as “ a good antidote to modern art.”[73] In 1932, a reviewer conceded that the quality of the landscapes and figure paintings by artists such as J. Jeffrey Grant, Oskar Gross and Othmar Hoffler in the annual exhibition was high, if mostly academic in style, and expressed hope that the annual show might become more “radical.” He wrote in this regard that that many still believed that the club was “a logical place for the eventual fostering of good lively ‘modern’ experiments.”[74] The one reviewer whom the club could count on to cover their exhibitions regularly was Eleanor Jewett.[75]

On July 13, 1933, the Palette and Chisel Club officially changed its name to the Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine Arts. The academy set forth a new objective in its revised articles of incorporation:

…to found, build, maintain and operate a school and library of fine arts and design; to build , maintain and operate studios, lecture halls and galleries in connection therewith; and to carry on appropriate activities conducive to the artistic development of the community; to form, preserve and exhibit collections of objects of art of all kinds; to cultivate and extend the art of drawing, painting, modeling and design by any appropriate means; to provide lectures, instructions and entertainments in furtherance of the said general purposes.[76]

Since the academy had been experiencing financial difficulties during the Great Depression, the decision to expand operations seems surprising, and, indeed, it appears to have caused further stress on the struggling institution. The academy had sold the summer camp at Fox Lake by 1935 and undertook a massive membership drive in 1936 for the first time in its history.[77] Although the academy was nearly bankrupt at one point, it continued to hold annual exhibitions of paintings, watercolors, and graphics and offered life classes. The combination of artistic conservatism and near bankruptcy took its toll, however, and by 1943, members were once again described as amateur or aspiring artists.[78]

Its importance for the city’s leading artists may have diminished drastically, but in 1945, The Art Institute of Chicago acknowledged the academy’s historical importance by hosting the organization’s fiftieth anniversary exhibition. Unlike the 1916 exhibition, however, which had displayed current work by active members, the 1945 exhibition was a retrospective that included several older works by artists who were deceased or no longer affiliated with the academy, such as Walter Ufer, Victor Higgins, Martin Hennings, and Wilson Henry Irvine.[79]

In a 1953 editorial in the academy’s publication, the president stated that while the organization pushed no specific style, “our members usually paint in a conservative manner and our galleries reflect this type of work.”[80] Further testimony to the complete dominance of a conservative aesthetic came in 1955, when Eleanor Jewett became the first woman to receive an honorary membership, which was given in recognition of “her outstanding encouragement and help to art and artists of Chicago.”[81]

Although women had been invited to club events and exhibitions since the club’s inception, they had been excluded from active membership. An important first step towards membership for women occurred in 1961, when the academy established a “Women’s Associate Membership” category. In return for annual dues of sixty dollars per year, women associates were able to use the studio two mornings a week, participate in the academy’s fund-raising exhibitions, and organize their own exhibitions.[82] As with male applicants, female applicants were asked to submit three samples of artwork for review before they could be accepted. The first woman to join the academy was Ruth Van Sickle Ford, a well-known watercolorist and the president of the Chicago Academy of Art.[83] Other women soon followed, including Adee Dodge, Tribal Chief and Administrator of the Navajo Indian Nation.[84] In 1968, all barriers to women were dissolved, and women became active members with all the privileges heretofore reserved for men.

After a period of financial setbacks in the 1970s, the 1980s were a time in which membership expanded once again. Two other important developments also occurred. In 1981, the Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine Arts building was entered onto the National Record of Historic Places. And, after many years of being entirely maintained and run through the voluntary efforts of its members, in 1988 the academy hired its first paid executive director, Marguerite Perret.

Since the 1980s, there has been a boom in membership, and today there are more than three hundred dues-paying members of the academy.[85] In addition, there are also patron and student memberships. A major change from earlier years is that classes are no longer restricted to members, although non-members must pay a higher fee to attend. Members also may rent studios and have forty-five hours per week of open studio time with models. The flier for the academy’s Fall/Winter 2001 class schedule states that the organization’s mission is “to foster growth in the visual arts, provide a place for serious artists to work, and enrich the community with programs of practical art education, art appreciation, and exhibitions.” A non-profit charitable organization, the academy has recently embarked on a program called “Young Chicago Draws,” which provides membership scholarships to high school students in conjunction with the Marwen Foundation.

From a small band of students who assembled out of a need for additional studio time to a scholarship-granting art school, the Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine Arts has had an interesting history. Today it has a solid presence in the city as a leading exponent of very traditional realism. Although the quality of work created by current members is not at the level of the early years, the Palette and Chisel’s programs and exhibitions will undoubtedly continue to fill a need into the foreseeable future among local artists espousing a traditional aesthetic.

[1] Palette and Chisel Log Book 1, p. 7.

[2] “The Palette and Chisel Club,” The Inland Printer 17:3 (June 1896): n.p. Copy of article in Log Book 1, p. 13.

[3] The Inland Printer; written narrative in Log Book 1, p. 7, also discusses this arrangement.

[4] The first president was Carl Mauch, with Frederick Mulhaupt serving as vice president, Fred T. Larson as secretary, and Curtis Gandy as treasurer.

[5] Officers and Members of the Palette and Chisel Club Chicago Season 1896-7. Chicago: Palette and Chisel Club, 1897.

[6] The Inland Printer.

[7], “Art Yields to Revelry,” Chicago Chronicle, exact date unknown, clipping in Log Book 1, p. 35.

[8] The Chicago Evening Post, May 1, 1897, clipping in Log Book 1, p. 16.

[9] The Chicago Evening Post, May 1, 1897.

[10] Log Book 2, p. 8.

[11] See Log Book 1, p. 59, and “Greet New York Artist,” Chicago Chronicle, December 12, 1897.

[12] French spoke to Club members about Chicago art on February 11, 1904, Log Book 1, p. 142; a “Bohemian Night” was held in honor of Mucha in 1907, Log Book 2, p. 28; Bellows spoke on November 20, 1919, Log Book 3, unpaginated/unbound; Pennell was honored on April 23, 1920, Log Book 3, unpaginated/unbound.

[13] “Give ‘Bohemian’ Dinner for Eminent Artist,” “Greet Famed Poster-Maker,” “Artists Feast on ‘Bozi,” unidentified newspaper clippings, Log Book 2, p. 31; “Palette and Chisel Smoker to Alphonse Mucha Ridicules Art’s Arch Enemy,” unidentified newspaper clipping, Log Book 2, p. 32. The Club’s campaign to have Mucha teach a class locally is mentioned by L. M. McCauley, “Art,” The Chicago Evening Post, April 27, 1907.

[14] Theodore Phillips, “The Salon de Refuse” Brush and Pencil, 1 (March 1898): 208-210; undated and untitled clipping from the Chicago Herald, Log Book 1, p. 65.

[15] “Catalogue of the Salon de Refuse,” exhibition pamphlet, February 12, 1898, Log Book 1, p. 65.

[16] “Art,” Chicago Tribune, March 12, 1899, “Art, Chicago Tribune, March 18, 1899.

[17] F. Holme, “The Palette and Chisel Club,” Brush and Pencil 2 (April 1898): 37-43.

[18] Holme, p. 40.

[19] Holme, p. 40.

[20] “Art,” Chicago Tribune, March 12, 1899.

[21] James Pattison, “Pattison’s Art Talk,” Chicago Journal, December 12, 1903.

[22] Harriet Monroe, “Western Artists’ Exhibition,” Chicago Examiner, December 3, 1905.

[23] Lena M. McCauley, “Art,” The Chicago Evening Post, March 4, 1905.

[24] T. E. MacPherson, “Permanent Exhibition of the Palette and Chisel Club,” Brush and Pencil 17 (January 1906): 15-17.

[25] “Work of the Palette and Chisel Club,” Brush and Pencil 18 (December 1906): 214.

[26] “Work of the Palette and Chisel Club”: 213-18.

[27] “Work of the Palette and Chisel Club”: 213.

[28] Maratta spoke on December 11, 1906 (see Log Book 2, p. 36).

[29] “Chicago Will Be Idealized: Palette and Chisel Club Decides to Paint Local Scenes Instead of Rural Ones,” Chicago Tribune, January 11, 1905.

[30] “New Art Field Discovered. Palette and Chisel Club to Make Brown County, Ind., Famous,” unidentified newspaper clipping, Log Book 2, p. 109; “Academy Echoes,” unidentified newspaper clipping from Oldenberg Indiana, September 13, 1910, Log Book 2, p. 128. The Indiana article reported that Victor Higgins, Otto Hake, August Petrtyl and Rudolph Ingerle had visited the area that summer.

[31] Palette and Chisel Club, Constitution (Chicago: The Club, 1912), unpaginated. Publication states that the constitution was revised in 1910.

[32] No mention of access to the studio is mentioned in the 1896 constitution.

[33] Log Book 2, p. 110.

[34] A list of the prize winners from 1913 to 1930 is in Log Book 4, unpaginated/unbound.

[35] “Foresee Center Here of Art in America: Chicagoans Praise Mayors’ Plan for Annual Purchase of Works of Merit,” unidentified newspaper clippoing, Log Book 2, p. 190. See also Dean Porter, Victor Higgins: An American Master (Salt Lake City, Utah: Peregrine Smith Books, 1991) pp. 39-40, and Sue Ann Prince, ed., The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde: Modernism in Chicago, 1910-1940 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press in association with the Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution, 1990), p. 228-9.

[36] “Artists Give up 2,500 for City: Chicagoans Reduce Their Prices to Enable Initial Purchases for Municipal Collection,” Chicago Herald, December 18, 1914; “City Buys 13 Art Works in Heated Debate,” Chicago Examiner, December 18, 1914.

[37] Victor Higgins, “Victor Higgins on Municipal Art,” The Cow Bell, 4, no. 2 (February 1915): n.p.

[38] “To Protect Art Lovers Who Buy Masterpieces: Palette and Chisel Club to Name Committee to Visit Dealers with Prospective Purchasers of Pictures,” undated clipping from the Record-Herald, Log Book 2, p. 164. The Committee was formed in response to a lawsuit filed by a local collector against a dealer on LaSalle Street who had misrepresented the value of a painting.

[39] Unidentified newspaper clipping, Log Book 2, p. 167. The term “futurist” in this sense appears to mean progressive. The term recurs in members’ and the press’s discussion of the 1915 abstract exhibition.

[40] “Spot Painting is Light Doing ‘Fox Trot’ on Canvas,” Chicago Examiner, December 18, 1914.

[41] “Artists, Attention,” The Cow Bell 4 (May 1, 1915): n.p.

[42] “New Art May be Hung in Any Way Your Fancy Says,” clipping from undated and unidentified newspaper, Log Book 2, p. 240; “Cubism Has Advanced Beyond Cubes, Exhibit at Clubroom Shows,” clipping from undated and unidentified newspaper, Log Book 2, p. 223.

[43] “New Art May be Hung in Any Way…,” Log Book 2, p. 240.

[44] See exhibition brochure for the abstract show for a complete listing of artists and works, Log Book 2, inserted between pages 223 and 224. Cover is pasted down, masking the show’s official title.

[45] “A Cubist ‘President’s Message,” Daily News, Beloit, Wisconsin, May 27, 1915, Log Book 2, p. 242.

[46] Cow Bell, May 1, 1915. This painting is unlocated; see Porter, pp. 80-81.

[47] “Club Walls Aglow,” The Cow Bell, June 1, 1915: n.p.

[48] Gene Morgan, “Seeing Chicago Clubdom: Here Are Prospering Artists Who Boost Prices, Cut Hair and Win International Prizes,” Chicago Sunday Herald, April 25, 1915.

[49] “Seeing Chicago Clubdom.”

[50] The Cow Bell, Sept. 1, 1915: 4.

[51] “Gives Musical Translaton of Abstract Canvas,” unidentified newspaper clipping, Log Book 2, p. 44: “Mr. Berger, who has been in sympathy with the idea of presenting emotions through color and abstract form, named his productions after the titles of the pictures which they interpreted.” See also: “Try This ‘March on Your Piano: Her’s Composer It Inspired: Composer Discovers Missing Art ‘Link’,” Chicago Herald, February 9, 1916; Zxqlk! Jjiik? Fq; That’s Bill’s Idea of ‘Abstract’ Art: Palette and Chisel Janitor Can’t Understand New School,” Chicago Tribune, May 18, 1915; and Artists, Attention,” The Cow Bell 4 (June 1, 1915): n.p. The articles in the Tribune and The Cow Bell also reported that an abstractist dance was performed by Gladys Nichols and Arthur Keyes at the opening of the exhibition.

[52] “Exponent of New Art to Arrive on Friday,” unidentified newspaper clipping, Log Book 2, p. 270. See also “Plans to Teach ‘Modelless’ Art,” unidentified newspaper clipping, Log Book 2, p. 270. There is no indication that such an exhibition was ever held.

[53] See Log Book 2, pp. 216- 218 for press clippings about Tableaux Vivants.

[54]See Log Book 2, pp. 245-248 for press clippings about the bookplate exhibition; “Artists Pose Girl Nude in Woods to Prove it is Art,” Saint Louis Times, October 4, 1915, and Chicago Herald, “Artists Sketch Undraped Model in Woods of Lake County,” October 4, 1915.

[55]While members had relaxed attitudes about nudity, they were not quite as open-minded about art that they perceived as being ugly. Objecting to a painting, entitled Sin, in an exhibition of work by twenty-year old artist Gordon Ertz on the grounds that it was unattractive, three of the four jurors rejected the work, explaining, “This is a radical club, and all that, but she’s beyond the outside limit entirely.” See “‘Sin’” Is Ostracized; Hidden in a Closet,” Chicago Herald, November 16, 1915. Juror John E. Phillips disagreed with the other jurors’ decision, noting “Well she’s repulsive, but so is sin, and that’s what Ertz means to convey.” “Art in the Abstract,” Chicago Examiner, November 12, 1915, has reproductions of three paintings included in Ertz’s exhibition.

[56] Lena M. McCauley, “Art and Artists,” The Chicago Evening Post, April 26, 1916.

[57] Catalogue: The Twenty-First Annual Exhibition of the Palette & Chisel Club, exh. cat. (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1916), unpaginated. Despite the catalogue title, the exhibition was not the club's twenty-first.

[58]Unidentified newspaper clipping, Log Book 3, unpaginated/unbound.

[59] Log Book 3, unpaginated/unbound.

[60] Exhibition brochure, Log Book 3, unpaginated.

[61] Kenneth Robert Hay, Five Artists and the Chicago Modernist Movement, 1909-1928, Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 1973 (Reprint. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University Microfilms, 1986), pp. 203-4. Hay cites a newspaper article from the Chicago Herald and Examiner, May 2, 1919. Weisenborn is listed in the brochure for the 1919 exhibition, Log Book 3, unpaginated/unbound.

[62] Sam Putnam, “Ramon Shiva: Modernist Painter and Maker of Colors Avoids Interview,” The Palette & Chisel, April 1925: 1-2. The introduction to Putnam’s interview states, “Owing to the difficulty encountered in getting an interview with the reluctant Mr. Shiva, THE PALLETTE [sic] AND CHISEL, at great expense, succeeded in securing the expert services of Mr. Sam Putnam of the Chicago Evening Post for the ordeal.”

[63] Eleanor Jewett, “Palette and Chisel Now Part of North Side Colony,” Chicago Tribune, June 5, 1921.

[64] “The No-Jury Society,” The Cow Bell, November 1923: n.p. The author wrote that “A strong showing by our members would have meant much publicity of a very desirable nature, but we prefer to let our light shine ‘under a bushel’ and then wonder why, when we have a scant attendance at club shows.”

[65] The Freeman, “Scrambled Cubism,” The Cow Bell, November 1923: n.p.

[66] “Abstractism Going: Joins Other Debris,” The Cow Bell, December 1924: n.p.

[67] “New Arlimusc Has Retrospective Show,” The Palette & Chisel, March 1928: 3. See also “Neo Arlimusc: A Detour and Some Discoveries,” The Palette & Chisel, April 1927: 7. The specific members who participated are not mentioned.

[68] C.H.C., “Decency in Art Advocated by the W. G. N.: Miss Jewett Not Afraid of Being Called Mrs. Grundy,” The Palette & Chisel, June 1925: n.p. For a discussion of the dispute between Jewett and Bulliett, see Sue Ann Prince, “‘Of the Which and the Why of Daub and Smear:’ Chicago Critics Take on Modernism,” in The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde, pp. 108, 110-11.

[69] C.H.C.: n.p.

[70] The reporter was likely Bulliett, as the derogatory comment about the club appeared in The Chicago Evening Post’s Magazine of the Art World. See “Palette and Chisel Club Men the Real Art Pioneers,” The Palette & Chisel, October 1926: n.p.

[71] No official history of the Palette and Chisel has been written to date, but in the short articles that have appeared in the organization’s newsletter about the club’s history, there is no mention of the abstract show. The exhibition is also not discussed in The Old Guard and the Avant-Garde, the best publication to date on the history of early modernism in Chicago.

[72] It is not clear whether reviewers were simply ignoring the shows or whether club members were not saving negative reviews.

[73] Irwin St. John Tucker, “Club’s Art Show Full of Beauty,” unidentified newspaper dated November 16, 1930, Log Book 3, unpaginated/unbound.

[74] T. V., “Palette-Chisel Show is Quiet, But Contains Choice Canvases,” Chicago Evening Post, April 12, 1932.

[75] The vast majority of exhibition reviews in the Log Books from the 1920s and 1930s are by Jewett.

[76] Revised articles of incorporation filed with the State of Illinois. A copy is in the Palette and Chisel pamphlet file at the Ryerson and Burnham Library, The Art Institute of Chicago.

[77] Log Book 5 (unpaginated/unbound), includes the membership brochure and mentions the close of the summer camp. See also Rich Morrow, “Chicago’s Living Heritage: The Palette & Chisel Academy of Fine Arts,” The Cow Bell, undated special anniversary edition, ca. 1995, unpaginated.

[78] “Two Evenings a Week for Art,” The Chicago Daily News, September 4, 1943: “Of the 65 members of Chicago’s Palette and Chisel Academy, 1012 N. Dearborn Street, the great majority are business and professional men who, in spite of their occupations, are determined to keep alive their lifetime ambitions to be artists.”

[79] “50^th Anniversary Exhibition: Palette and Chisel Academy of Art at The Art Institute of Chicago Galleries 52 and 53,” April 5 – May 20, 1945. Exhibition flier on file at the Ryerson and Burnham Library, The Art Institute of Chicago.

[80] Academy News, 1953, Log Book 6, p. 27.

[81] “Artists’ Academy Opens Doors to First Woman,” Chicago American, October 30, 1955. Jewett, who always praised the academy’s exhibitions, was a logical choice for this distinction. Modernists would have found the description of Jewett’s contributions to Chicago art astonishing.

[82] “Minutes of the Quarterly Meeting of the Members of the Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine Arts,” April 25, 1961. Copy of minutes in the Palette and Chisel pamphlet file, Ryerson and Burnham Library.

[83] Minutes of the Regular Monthly Meeting,” September 5, 1961.

[84] Rich Morrow, unpaginated.

[85] Dues are currently $360 per year